It’s been a while since Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has brought her Rosas team to challenge a London audience with her unique brand of geometrical dance although I doubt that any of her prior works has been quite so demanding on the intellect as this latest offering.
The enigmatically entitled EXIT ABOVE after the tempest, first performed in Brussels prior to an outing at the Avignon Festival last year, begins with a remarkable theatrical interpretation of a storm at sea, with effective staged use of a voluminous silken sheet and smoke to represent the frothing, angry waves, which was clearly the tempest after which EXIT ABOVE follows. The link between this fateful Shakespearean seascape and what transpires later is unclear, but it was nonetheless as impactful a scenic effect as I have witnessed this year.
The influences that De Keersmaeker and her team have absorbed in creating EXIT ABOVE are many and various but the connection between walking and dance dominates the choreographic palette, and the blues is clearly a basis for the music, which takes as a starting point the ‘30s song Walkin’ Blues by Robert Johnson, one of the greatest blues artists of all time.
The song title cements this connection between walking and the blues, which represents the underlying theme of the 80 minutes or so that came after the tempest; and De Keersmaeker herself also acknowledges an historic musical connection back to Der Wanderer, a song composed by Franz Schubert in the early 19th century. Without her reference to it, this link would have been lost to me. References to the blues and Schubert's lieder might imply an overall melancholia to the music but, in fact, it was toe-tappingly full of beat and rhythm.
The culture of singing while wandering ('wandern' in Flemish) is also at the heart of this work, as epitomised by the central role of Meskerem Mees, a charismatic, young Flemish folk singer/songwriter of Ethiopian heritage. She is more or less permanently on stage, singing a series of walking songs. Some – but not all – of the lyrics to her songs appear as surtitles on the backdrop. As an aside, I found it to be an irritation reading or deciphering the (sometimes illegible) projected words and imagery on the backdrop at the same time as trying to watch the movement onstage. It was impossible for one set of eyes to absorb this simultaneous visual information at different trajectories. Less would have been more.
Some of the music was also composed by Jean-Marie Aerts of the 1980s band, TC Matic, and also, by Carlos Garbin, a Brazilian guitarist (tall, bald and soaked in tattoos) who also, like Mees, performed live on stage. Both these musicians integrated seamlessly with the eleven dancers of Rosas as if they were themselves also professional dancers.
The early part of the post-tempest performance was dominated by walking, largely but not exclusively in group formations, at various tempos, either marching in military formation or moving in circles and other shapes, both as small groups or individuals. As the work progressed it was regularly punctuated by moments of silence and stillness, including a comparatively lengthy pause in proceedings as all thirteen performers stood in a row at the front of the stage, staring angrily at the audience, as if challenging us to a bar-room brawl. At another juncture, dancers faux-vomited, retching and writhing as if victims of some mass-poisoning.
This is not a work to be allowed to simply flow over the viewer. It requires a constant attentiveness over an unbroken hour-and-a-half to attempt any appreciation of the precision that has gone in to making apparently random movement construct complex geometric patterns, much of which I suspect went over my head. I was told after the performance that there were markings on the stage to guide the dancers in their perambulations, but these were not visible from my seat.
As the work progressed the dancers shed items of clothing (everyday wear designed by Aouatif Boulaich with sports shirts sporting slogans that were linked to the song lyrics) although, with a surprising but tasteful conservatism, only the male dancers ended topless. The small entourage of dancers had a refreshing diversity in terms of both ethnicity and physicality, such that each performer quickly established an individual personality in contrast to the uniformity of their function and the ordinariness of walking.
This is not an entertaining work (I would advise against booking tickets for a work outing or hen party), but there are significant moments of spectacle, such as that impactful opening and a burst of impressive b-boy power moves by Solal Mariotte, who alongside Mees and Garbin, appeared to be a survivor of that opening shipwreck while the other ten performers looked on from far upstage. These moments and the impressive music, especially in the live singing of Mees, are well worth the sometimes bewildering array of simultaneous activity, the confusions of intent and the occasional periods of inactivity.
