In Lightfoot and Leon’s Shut Eye we’re invited to peek through a door that opens on to a triangular setting of lights and shadows, onto couples and groups that dance wonderfully synchronous movement but seem ultimately out of reach to each other. Shut eye is a series of attempts to touch met with rejection, loss of security and the inability to connect. A man loses his love interest to another man. A woman steps away from the door where the man she's with stands against, with his back turned to her. Her leaving doesn’t even register to him.
The lightning is effective: the large shadow of a seated person, detached, watching, looms behind the dancers. Later on, a Rorschach-like light bulb above the door turns into a person (is it a man, a woman?). The bulb’s dance nicely complements the movement happening at the forefront of the stage by NDT’s finests dancers: supple movements, stable positions and fast turns. Jorge Nozal makes dancing look easy the way Eddie van Halen made guitar playing seem like a walk in the park. The pas de deux by Marne and Myrthe van Opstal is good. Roger van der Poel and Chuck Jones move fast and all the dancers command attention from the audience. But the dance is loud enough by itself and does not need the musical crescendo at the end.
The piece is smart, the dance virtuoso, but it isn’t heart-wrenching, which Leon and Lightfoot’s Shoot the Moon or the brilliant Short Time Together accomplished easily. Emotionally, NDT can do even better than this otherwise great piece on this night.
The night’s second piece Clowns (Hofesh Shechter) is a well delivered punch in our faces. The circus has come to town: the stage is red and lit with circus lights along the ceiling, and smoke fills the space. The ringmaster Rupert Tookey beckons us as if to say: “We’re in hell here and you’re all coming with us!”
The dance fits with our current bizarre political theatre, devoid of urgency, lacking visionary leadership. Shechter offers no way out either. He just shows us how deep we’ve fallen, mesmerized by entertainment on our way down... In the words of Neil Postman, amusing ourselves to death. The piece is reminiscent of the fall of Rome, with its gratuitous violence and sensual hints. The ringmaster and his dancers perversely gloat in the violence they portray. They expect applause and praise as they move to the front of the stage, proud of their work, ‘Look what we’re doing. Isn’t it grand?!’ They celebrate. It might as well have been called an afternoon with Nero.
Shechter’s collective style leaves little space for individual dancers to shine as they did in the first piece (If the movie Matrix was ever turned into a musical you can bet your bottom dollar that the Zion underground party scene would be choreographed by Shechter) yet it's perfectly suited for the collective groovy madness he aims to describe here.