As the audience filed into New York's Joyce Theater on Tuesday night, a man hunched over in an aisle, barefoot and rooted to the spot, trembling and clutching the back of one of the seats. The fact that the crowd, including the ushers, streamed past and ignored him suggested that they were jaded New Yorkers or were otherwise playing along, for he turned out to be one of several admirable dancers of Compagnie DYPTIK planted in the audience.
Two dancers were already onstage when the curtain rose, limbs jerking and torsos undulating in a kind of homage to a light mounted on a circular panel that resembled a spider’s web. The others spent roughly the first 20 minutes of the one-hour performance stumbling, convulsing and careening as if propelled by an unseen force toward the light on stage. To the throb of EDM and the occasional sound of distorted voices chanting some childlike rhymes, they took frequent detours through the tight rows, squeezing past ticket-holders, alternately staring into the distance with beatific serenity, grinning wildly and sobbing violently.
The premise of the piece bordered on cliché: eight dancers in party clothes escaped their individual isolation – they could’ve been capitalist drones or political prisoners, in COVID lockdown or a cult. Once they found their tribe onstage they slipped into a frenzy of fitful movement punctuated by elements of breakdance, folk, contemporary and ballet, splendidly executed in fleeting solo or ensemble maneuvers. In the end they all perished, having experienced (program notes would have us believe) an interim state of liberation and ecstasy.
Auteur-choreographers Souhail Marchiche and Mehdi Meghari were reportedly inspired by tales of a medieval ‘dancing plague’ that infected hundreds, driving many of them to their graves. Believed then to be evidence of demonic possession, the affliction was later understood to be a mass psychosomatic response to the grinding realities of feudal life. Today, in an increasingly authoritarian post-COVID world, the idea of choreomania – a contagion of movement rather than disease – can capture and transform pent-up rage over lockdowns and border fences.
“The choreography invites a rebellion of bodies,” the program advises, with “no other way out than to dance.”
This was, however, a ragtag rebellion with no apparent enemy, without armature or forward momentum. Relief from a long battery of tics and displays of double-jointedness came in random bursts of virtuosity: deftly executed UFO’s and windmills; swirling balletic lifts; crisp popping in fluid phrases; a whirling tug-of-war between two dancers; a manège of turns that transitioned seamlessly into jumps. Intriguing, too, were evanescent glimpses of folk dance: a grapevine; body percussion; the intricate hand gestures of Anatolian dance. But it was hard to take any of this seriously as the dancers cycled rapidly like circus clowns through theatricalized exaggerations of emotion – gawping, grimacing, grinning, cackling, pouting, panicking. Without the clowning and with more of the virtuosic unison choreography, the work might have sold the danger posed by a mass movement.
Rather than dance as threat, as a form for protest, dance is presented as more of an endurance test. This is just one of the clichés embraced in Le Grand Bal. Then there is the flash mob (dancers popping out suddenly from the audience), frequent ensemble tableaux as if posing for family photos, a sound-surround system that added a ghostly effect to the lackluster score, and a red stage wash and strobe lighting foreshadowing the extinction of this civilization.
Le Grand Bal lacked the tautness and power of an earlier work which the company brought to New York in 2019, called Dans l’Engrenage (In the Gear). Here, Marchiche and Meghari deployed voguing, popping, roboting, modern dance and the traditional Arab dabke to portray unrest and violence under corporate overlords. The ominousness of the proceedings was heightened by a thrilling score that layered EDM and Middle Eastern influences, composed by Patrick De Oliveira who also scored Le Grand Bal.
If only Le Grand Bal had focused on: why are these people dancing? And what finished them off?
Instead, the choreographers staked its novelty on an attempt to be immersive–practically impossible in a proscenium setting – trying to transmit the feeling of being swept up in a fugue state. Hence the dancers invading ‘our space’, making bodily contact (or at least staring into our eyes, their sternums heaving ecstatically, while smashed against our knees). But audiences are conditioned to sit quietly, as in church, to appreciate the spectacle from a safe distance and applaud the dancers once it’s over. Le Grand Bal may have hit more strongly in a different kind of venue: under the spreading branches of a mighty oak at dusk, or in a smoky basement lit by neon.
