In a thoughtfully curated double bill at The Hague’s Korzo Theatre, two choreographers take us on parallel journeys through the inner and outer landscapes of human striving. Stand By Me by Ukrainian artist Vladyslav Detiuchenko and Exit Sign by Dutch house choreographer Zino Schat are starkly different in tone and style but together they sketch a bleak yet compelling portrait of longing, ambition, and collapse.
In Stand By Me, Vladyslav Detiuchenko is joined on stage by dancer and assistant choreographer Veronika Rakitina. Together, they craft a duet suspended in memory and mourning. The program note speaks of “absolute darkness” and “ghosts of the past,” and that’s precisely the realm we enter. Drenched in melancholy, the choreography is slow-burning and elliptical, as if memory itself is moving the bodies, not the dancers. The two figures move toward and away from each other in looping gestures. One lift dissolves before it finds resolution, a physical metaphor for something that cannot quite be sustained. Is it Love? Connection?
It’s not always easy to follow, but perhaps that’s the point. Like the films of Tarkovsky or the dreamscapes of Pina Bausch, Stand By Me is less about narrative than atmosphere. Petrovich’s sparse set, Rosbag’s shadowy lighting, and a haunting score by Yurii Shepeta and Maxim Shalygin contribute to the sensation of being adrift in someone else’s half-remembered love story. At times, it risks becoming a little too abstract, though the emotional sincerity of the performers holds it together.
Then comes Exit Sign, and the tone shifts dramatically. Where Stand By Me is internal and metaphysical, Schat’s piece is all sharp edges and social critique. Drawing from his background in the street and battle dance scene, Schat builds a highly physical work that takes aim at hierarchical power structures. There are echoes here of Hofesh Shechter’s Political Mother, though without quite the same sonic or choreographic assault.
Schat’s movement vocabulary, rooted in hip-hop and krump, gives the work a punchy urgency, and the cast throw themselves into it with full-bodied commitment. But after a while, the point begins to feel laboured. Power corrupts; cycles repeat; structures break us. Message received.
Still, there’s something admirable in the way these two works are paired. Stand By Me explores the collapse of the self; Exit Sign interrogates the systems that shape it. One looks inward, the other outward, yet both ask the same essential question: what happens when we lose our way, either emotionally, morally, or politically? Eva LAKEMAN 23rd May 2025
