Dull Lights

Cullberg Ballet in Budapest

The Cullberg Ballet arrived to Hungary with three choreographed pieces from Johan Inger, artistic director of the company since 2003. On one hand, Inger follows Mats Ek, mixing dance with mime. There are ordinary gestures in his pieces, but his vision is less grotesque and ironic. The focus obviously shifts from classical ballet to contemporary dance. The role of space and spatiality increases (see the pieces: Point of Eclipse, Position of Elsewhere) and the sensitive use of lighting makes the human senses roam to dark, northern lands. However, through the journey of these pieces, the power which could make these pieces showcase smart choreography and skillful dancing is gone.
Felix Lajkó’s music and a huge circling curtain space element creates strange vision-like atmosphere of the Empty House. Just as a galactic windmill which spins from itself all the creatures and, in the end, keeps them all back, except for the dancers. The performance starts with their ritual movements, in a sharply lit circle. The female dancer’s static movements in the middle of the circle frame the male dancer in a circular motion. This circularity is the main element not only of the first piece, but of the night, and of the other two performances too. It draws a line of forces on the stage. This motif is especially important in the Empty House, because there aren’t any interactions among the dancers. They don’t exist for each other, only in their own relation to the space. They are dancing through this sparsely lit stage more and more energetically just as lonely planets, as a girl and a boy in the first scene, and the fluid movements ending with a simple stop with their backs to the audience. The choreographic intention purely culminates in a game between body and space dissolving the very moments of dance.
Negro con Flores is more stratified work. Johan Inger placed a television to the left side of the stage. In it we can see faces of sleeping girls and guys – probably the dancers. At the same time, cheerful and funereal pictures of the mind waking during a dream are animated, one after the other. A girl drapes her blanket on the floor, preparing for a picnic; another is doing her endless marathon-circling – numerous moments from everyday life, lifted to the stage, raising a smile in a changed context. The climax of the night is the friendly-loving fight between the two guys: one marks their meeting point with a big bouquet of roses. Then he frames the body of his lying partner who rejects the flowers. Then, at the blink of an eye, five roses are planted virtuously into the ground forming a mini-garden. Exciting balance-poses, poses sliding into the darkness, sinking bodies all create an illusion of the partner…
Lighting has a main role in this piece also. The strong light of the lamp drifting from hand to hand looks to create a scene darker than in the Empty House. This game with lighting lifts the funny and dark scenes into surrealism, but I presume they couldn’t realize the original plans from the Palace of Art, in Budapest. According to all the previous reviews and video recordings of the choreography, mostly only silhouettes or clouds of the bodies are visible, and the television shows only in black. This piece is so “photosensitive” that a little bit more bright composition kills the work. Hence the television becomes a didactic and decorative element to explain the “story”, and the comic scenes aren’t contrapuntal by the stress of darkness.
There is a narrative type of Bolero-interpretation at the end. Johan Inger follows the Ek-tradition in his way of adapting classical music into his piece. The Walking Mad wants to fall into line with the Ek-pieces forming the classical ballet-canon into the ordinary and banal, just as Carmen, Sleeping Beauty and Giselle. The main space-element is a huge, stage-wide, moveable wall. There are doors on it, it can be transformed into a bed, or a foundation for a stage on a stage. Folding this space-element creates a claustrophobic corner, from where the only way to escape is to climb up. The story is about the stormy and stressful love life of three women and half dozen men but the act is difficult to follow. This Bolero-variant filled with gags, was born simply to demonstrate that he can create Ek-friendly narratives, besides his two abstract works. The puppet-like movements, flexing feet, the men’s group prissy and feminine dance strengthen the comical side of the choreography. Even the dramatic stop of the music, the silence, the female dancer’s thrashing and the duo with a strong black male dancer is not able to break the line of funny ideas, not even for a moment.
The character of these three pieces is different however they wear the same uniform, homogenizing them into something which is truly not very memorable.