Tag: David Lynch

KOURTNEY KARDASHIAN

Small Theatres

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Created by Sleepwalk Collective

Performed by iara Solano Arana and Nhung Dang

The Spanish/British company Sleepwalk Collective turn the spotlight on celebrity culture with a coolly elegant discourse on opera and our modern value system. Following on from their 2016 ballet Kim Kardashian and the 2017 stage play Khloé Kardashian, this production continues to explore the increasing dissonance in our lives as technology and rampant consumerism moves us further and further away from real lived experiences and closer to a point where even our humanity can be outsourced.

This production looks and sounds gorgeous. Lush lighting and a soundscape of opera and birdsong by Sammy Metcalfe which emanates from speakers adorned with gold bows to match the dramatic gold gowns of the elegantly, beautiful performers. There are tiny horses, and caskets of gold leaf to be eaten and washed down with flutes of champagne. This is an extraordinary night for us – the golden people, the elite, the intelligentsia. And yet, all is not as it seems, instead this is a deconstruction of the Opera, of Celebrity and of us the audience. The gleaming gold evening dresses are made of emergency blankets. The Arias are not sung by the performers instead it is a recording of their parents in 1992. Chillingly the audience are warned that they are no longer necessary, we can be outsourced and replaced by canned laughter.

Wonderfully strange and seductive, there is a real sense of Sleepwalk Collective taking their audience deep into a dream sequence where opera stage meets lecture theatre in a world that is decidedly that of David Lynch. Dead eyed and nihilistic it could be Laura Palmer on stage instead of Iara Solano Arana. The imposed mental haziness of this production may not be for everyone, but the discombobulation is highly effective. The invitation to wake up from the dream of vacuous existence is potent. The warning of a wolf riding a tsunami and the ghosts caught up in the machine are uncomfortable reminders of who we are and what may become of us if we continue to ignore the lessons of the past. This Spanish/British collaboration of big dreamers are inviting us the “intelligentsia” to learn from when Rome burned or Pompeii vanished. This is a joke worn horribly thin…

At HOME 7th – 9th March 2019

Images by IsasiFoto

TORO: Beauty and the Bull

Dance, Small Theatres

THE LOWRY

DeNada Dance Theatre

Choreographer Carlos Pons Guerra

Dreamy and ethereal, Toro opens with a delicately beautiful girl lying on the Stage like the eponymous Sleeping Beauty while two brothers play Rock, Paper, Scissors. The traditional themes of fairy tales are subverted throughout this performance. The heroes and the monsters overlap, blur and change places. This opening scene is not that of a sleeping heroine about to be awoken with a kiss by a handsome Prince, but two brothers performing a perfunctory, machismo ritual to decide who gets first dibs on the young prostitute.

DeNada Dance Theatre are a young independent company who focus on exploring and subverting Hispanic and Latin culture. There is great theatricality in their work which looks and feels sumptuous and decadent. They use storytelling in dance to make bold political and social statements. In this piece they explore persecution and ostracism using fairytales focusing on themes of transformation. The lush, dreamlike imagery has elements of Angela Carter’s fairy tales, and the filmic feel of Guillamo del Toro or David Lynch. Toro includes fairy tales, circus sideshows, freak shows, animalistic orgies, vogue balls, monsters and beauties, poignant tenderness and brutal violence.

The performance has six dancers – four males and two females. Emma Walker and Marivi Da Silva are the Girl and the Bull, both performances are incredibly powerful and emotive. The scene where they unite in real tenderness and harmony is profoundly moving and deeply sensuous. The coming together of the dispossessed and “other” is truely beautiful. In this moment the Beast gets the real, red blooded woman whereas the men who are the real monsters of this piece have had nothing but a broken doll or marionette.

The four male dancers play a number of roles as the Brothers, as Matadors and as fantastical creatures – the Dragimals. In the machismo roles they are all rippling, twitching muscle and brutal intent. As the Dragimals they are all sinuous, luxuriating flesh and gleaming bodies. They are spectacular and animalistic moving harmoniously and curiously as at a great feast and celebratory orgy.

Warm, lush lighting and decadent costumes, a rich Hispanic soundtrack of pasodoble, mariachi, bull fight music and Unchained Melody to set off beautifully choreographed dance….I would watch this again in a heartbeat. Closing scenes show Jonathon Luke Baker portraying a mortally, wounded dragimal evoking Swan Lake, while the Girl is trapped struggling against the ties of patriarchal matrimony while her glorious Minotaur or She-Bull is dehorned and weakened. There is no Disney happy ending to this fairy tale yet this is still a powerful and uplifting tale of the transformative effect of love, tenderness and acceptance.

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