Programme notes for Pontus Lidberg’s On the Nature of Rabbits tell us the choreographer was inspired by “true-life events after the fall of the Berlin Wall and at the peak of the AIDS epidemic.” Rabbits rambles ritualistically through an hour marked by poignant moments and stretches of laboured rumination. It was commissioned for last summer’s Venice Biennale as part of a dance festival dubbed ‘Altered States’ whose curators invited us into “this blissful state of unknowing… sensing from the inside out, our internal chemistry - our interoception sense in overdrive” in which dance has the power to “metamorphosise… naturally occurring chemicals in our bloodstreams.”
Lidberg didn't write that pretentious drivel. But under its influence, I thought he might go all acid-rock Jefferson Airplane on us, invoking Grace Slick’s “White Rabbit” – “And if you go chasing rabbits/ And you know you're going to fall/ Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar / Has given you the call” – one of the first songs about drugs that managed to evade censors on the radio.
Instead, Lidberg has tenderly rendered in dance a string of childhood dreams and nightmares centred around a stuffed toy bunny – a woolgathering coming-of-age memoir produced with the barest of props and stage effects. Events are not recounted chronologically: sometimes Lidberg and co-conspirator Hussein Smko appear to be playing children, sometimes they are adults. Their essential rabbit-ness emerges in outbursts of bouncing and hopping, though it’s unclear whether this is meant to convey playfulness or a state of oppression as their facial expressions throughout veer from vaguely melancholic to intensely melancholic.
In a charmingly surreal childhood dream sequence, an anthropomorphic white rabbit ties balloons around Lidberg’s waist, wrist and ankle as he lies sleeping. (Lidberg’s wearing pyjamas so we know he’s playing a kid.) The rabbit hoists him effortlessly off the ground, still stretched out as if asleep. Lidberg appears to levitate – with the assistance of some clever lighting – floating then pivoting gracefully in the air.
A scrim stands in for the Berlin Wall, against which projections of a thunderstorm hint at its impending demolition. Lidberg and Damiano Artale manoeuvre a gleaming aluminium ladder to striking effect, moving heads, arms and torsos in and out of the spaces created by the rungs, artfully undressing and swapping clothes while doing so, lifting and lowering the ladder while one of them perches on it. The ladder separates them at times, unites them in intimacy at others.
The scrim also sets up a scene both funny and ominous in which Smko replicates the jerky dance moves of a giant shadow of a rabbit projected on the scrim. Fascism lurks, but mostly it lurks in the score, which kicks off with the unsettling four-note motif from the opening of Shostakovich’s 8th String Quartet and repeatedly returns to this work, widely believed to embody the composer’s protest against totalitarianism.
Overall, the fierce intensity of the score – the Shostakovich interspersed with evocative compositions by Stefan Levin – is jarringly mismatched with the strange languor of the dance.
The one exception is the devastating episode in which Smko appears to fall ill – scanning and gripping different parts of his body as if discovering sores. The white rabbit (now the rabbit of death) appears to lead him offstage after stuffing balloons into his clothes so that they bulge like enormous tumours.
The rest of the piece is a series of flights of fancy that either don’t achieve lift-off or quickly run out of fuel. Balloons as a symbol, whether of illness or fragile containers of hopes and dreams, lose steam after being trotted out endlessly. A squishy balloon leaks a steady stream of water through a small hole: this is deployed with tiresome frequency as a drinking fountain and as a figurative source of various bodily fluids that spill out onto the stage. Then there is the mother figure – the stoic Colleen Thomas, in a long silvery blue satin shift. She shows up mainly to put an end to childish bouncing rabbit games, to bust up a budding friendship between Lidberg and Smko, and to mop up the water that has puddled onto the stage from the squishy balloon.
The piece closes with a relentless duet between Lidberg and Artale, an interminable recycling of a half dozen contact improv moves, during which my mind drifted. To Christopher Rudd’s groundbreaking Touché. To the alternately tense and tender duet from Justin Peck’s The Times are Racing. And above all to Lar Lubovitch’s soaring Duet from Concerto 622 that, at the time of its creation in 1985 at the height of the AIDS crisis, reflected in Lubovitch’s own words, “the depth of friendship expressed as friends helped friends to die.”
