Postmodernism fetishizes complexity: to be of artistic value, the logic seems to go, one must be opaque. Anything simple is considered naïve and unsophisticated. And yet why should it be so? Surely that’s a narrowness of its own. Anyway, for all those reasons, Mark Morris’ Sandpaper Ballet (1999) took me by surprise because I simply wasn’t expecting that sort of happy-go-lucky work to open the KCB’s trio of contemporary ballets.
It was almost as if school children had suddenly become skilled ballerinas, but essentially remained at play: even the 5 x 5 grid to which the dancers regularly returned had the look of a school line-up. Even more so, as the occasional one would sidle down a few places in line, eyeing the others up, playfully demoted. This was happy troupe dancing and everything from the grass green leotards topped with blue sky and white clouds to the springy jazz numbers spoke of uncomplicated joy. Leroy Anderson’s light mid-century music gave it a vernacular American feel.
I’d seen Jiří Kylián's Petite Mort (1991) years ago, and it was refreshing to be reminded of it again. It begins in silence with men swishing swords, and when Mozart starts (Kylián has used the slow movements from two piano concertos), we feel something of a relief: it’s grounding to have something so familiar and elegant to listen to in the classical tradition, so that we can enter with greater confidence into the terrain of discomfort. I really liked Elke Schepers’ staging here: the costumes reminded me of Lear (man as bare forked animal), and the ‘staged’ crinolines which had a life of their own and the swords, spoke their own messages about the women and men that they sought to essentialize. The various pas de deux were sinuous, intimate and demanding and again, felt very grounded in Mozart.
The highlight of the evening was Alexander Ekman’s Cacti. We were very firmly in the postmodern camp here, but in the most riotous (non)sense: anything esoteric was merely off-the-wall, positively barmy and unthreatening, rather than aloof. At times, indeed, it was laugh-out-loud funny, and when do we get to say that at the ballet? Ekman created Cacti out of frustration at the way his work was being written about by reviewers, so it seems churlish to step in and impose structure on what is a consistently confounding, devil-may-care work, cocking a snook at all meaning and pretentious over-statement.
It seems proper to let the work be, in its own inimitable category of zaniness. The shining palettes, cleverly spot-lit mini-stages for each of the sixteen dancers. Drums? Tribal altars? Work-benches? Tombs? Planters (for those cacti)? Treadmills? Walls? Pedestals? They were all of the above, and in constant rearrangement: the mobile dancers met craziness with a terrific energy of their own. The Opus 76 string quartet alluringly joined the dancers on stage, sometimes upstaging them, walking on and off at casual intervals. A ticklish one-of-a-kind pas de deux (tonight featuring Courtney Nitting and Angelin Carran), was danced with voiceovers as if the dancers were in rehearsal, featuring peripheral commentary, banter, trade of insults. A more general voice-over played off faux academese with choreographic self-doubt to the very end: a skittish mishmash. That and the dead cat lopped onto the stage at one point put it firmly into the category of the theater of the absurd. I had fun, and I think most of the audience did too. I’d have to see it all again from the start to be prepared for the joke from the very first. In the beginning was the joke. And the joke’s on us.
