Inevitably, a show entitled Twenty-Seven Perspectives is bound to take that many different points of view (by the way, it is apparently a reference to the deconstruction of a Cezanne painting into 27 constituent elements by a Swiss conceptual artist). In this case, French choreographer, Maud Le Pladec, has based her varied approaches upon Franz Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony (his eighth), which has been reimagined (or, more particularly, deconstructed) into a soundscape by Pete Harden of the Dutch contemporary music group, Ensemble Klang.
The recorded sound was often thunderous and occasionally so heavily amplified that it was distorted (at one uncomfortable point towards the end it seemed to be reverberating through my chest). Ensemble Klang’s current 20th anniversary tour goes by the name of the Big Loud Thing series. On this evidence, it seems a most appropriate title!
To add to this musical confusion, the dancers are often disconnected from it, hearing something different from the noise experienced by the audience. A fascinating experiment in deconstruction but one that didn’t enhance this work as there was nothing to tell the audience that the dancers were (sometimes) in a different sound world to the rest of us.
Le Pladec has been director of the National Choreographic Centre in Orleans since 2017 (she succeeded Josef Nadj) and Twenty-Seven Perspectives was initially created for the Festival Montpellier Danse, a year later. Her aesthetic for the piece is impersonal and often austere. The bare stage has a plain white dance floor curved up into an arc at both sides. Ten dancers appeared to be wearing their own clothes (Adidas tracksuit bottoms, vests, shorts etc) all in a dull grey/blue colourway apart from a pair of vibrant yellow leggings and a pair of lemon coloured shorts, like splashes of watercolour in a drab pencil drawing.
The work was just short of an hour’s duration and to the credit of Le Pladec and her dancers she introduced so many switches and changes in her direction that it generally remained interesting. Each variation came swiftly and none of the sequences appeared over-long. The dancers rarely looked at each other and there was little contact or chemistry between them although there was a central partnered duet (with the other eight dancers forming a circle around the pair) and in the finale they held hands in an upstage line facing away from the audience. I recall one other moment when a dancer laying on the stage held the ankle of the standing foot of another stretching out in arabesque. But, beyond these isolated moments each dancer largely inhabited their own solitary island of space.
This general lack of connection amongst the dancers was clearly deliberate but also, for me at least, a problem. Choreographically, each dancer often did their own thing, in their own space, but perhaps two or three of them would then move uniformly or in canon. Occasionally – it was most obvious in the first section – they would suddenly switch from apparently random movement into group synchronisation without any obvious musical or physical cue (and without looking at each other) so one assumes counting must have been the key. This harmonisation and the geometry of the movement was the best of it.
The harmony was not always achieved collectively. In one sequence the ten dancers were balancing – again facing away from the audience - with their back legs raised but first one, and then another, had to place the raised foot on the floor to stay in balance. Such moments of imprecision diminished the overall aesthetic.
Another of Le Pladec’s choreographic devices was to take her dancers off the stage and seat them in the front row of the audience. The first time was a surprising breach of the fourth wall, but it was then repeated several times, in different permutations of dancers, during the rest of the performance and this regular repetition became boring.
The ten dancers were intentionally very different – ethnically, physically, facially – from divergent backgrounds but even so I found some to be almost anonymous within the group (again, perhaps this was deliberate). Their individual and combined movement quality in Le Pladec’s pared-down choreography was worthy, but I felt no connection with any of them and their work was let down by an uncomfortable sound quality and volume. Le Pladec is not much known here in the UK and unfortunately, this brief engagement at the Wells is unlikely to change that anonymity.
