Here We Are And Now is one of the (many) highpoints of the year at Korzo. Each December, in association with Nederlands Dans Theater, it invites three young international choreographers to showcase their work in a conducive and encouraging environment in front of a knowledgeable and enthusiastic audience. This year the participants come from Japan, Canada and Germany, the last two with strong links to The Netherlands, The Hague in particular.
Yukiko Masui’s RONiN O was astounding. We are accustomed to “black box” settings for dance with little or no thought given to the surroundings in which the action takes place. Ms Masui’s piece filled every available surface with breath-taking projections which covered the theatre’s huge back wall and the stage floor as well, engulfing the audience and all its senses.
Yukiko Masui is based at The Place in London, a long established dance centre, not unlike Korzo, from which I suspect the Dutch set-up based its model and took much of its inspiration. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the piece was very Japanese with the opening scene – a giant wall of shimmering bamboo putting me in mind of Kaneto Shindo’s 1964 film Onibaba about two women who ambush and kill lost/fleeing soldiers – in fact a Ronin was a lone, wandering Samurai with no allegiances.
So, we entered the auditorium to discover the lone dancer kneeling in a rectangle of light in front of the aforementioned wall of bamboo. The impression was that she was on a raft floating in a tranquil sea or even riding on a magic carpet. The bamboo metamorphosed into equally relaxing water but, with the appearance of the male dancer, the tranquillity dispersed and the piece became a demonstration of Japanese martial arts, including some beautifully choreographed Samurai sword fights. But it was the visuals, the projections that dominated the performance, even to the point of distraction. There was a constantly moving kaleidoscope ranging from colourful trees shedding their leaves to the harsh, hard edged lines and shapes often reminiscent of an Escher print. Amazing stuff and one of the best things I have seen at Korzo for a long time. What we saw this evening was only a twenty-minute extract for a full-length piece – that’s something I would certainly like to see.
NDT dancer Charlie Skuy’s brilliant The Stomach continued the immersive drama as did, to a certain extent, the oriental content. The piece, exploring the feeling we all get in the pit of stomach, sometimes of fear, sometimes of joy, opened with a rather self-conscious Japanese school girl sitting centre-stage twiddling her pig-tails and pulling faces. Upstage there appeared to be a strange bird fluttering in a low pillar. The bird metamorphosed into a sinister cloaked masked figure and the story began with elements of surrealism and Theatre of the Absurd. The first sequence involved the conflict between a pair of raggedy homeless people and, although the piece was quite dark and sinister with swirling smoke and dramatic lighting, there was a lot of humour too, notably when the diminutive Japanese dancer lip-synched to a very raucous male Flamenco singer. The dénouement was to a beautiful rendition of I Get Along Without You Very Well by Nina Simone. Loved it.
With the evening’s final piece, Antibodies by Korzo in-house maker Constantin Trommlitz, we returned to more familiar, predictable ground. The projections, dramatic lighting and swirling smoke were gone and we were back on the theatre’s huge bare stage with its concrete and raw-brick walls and simple lighting. This again was a two-hander, the male and female dancer exploring and exposing the pain of a relationship. More conventional it might have been, but Mr Trommlitz demonstrated some very fancy break-dance moves which certainly grabbed the audience’s attention. Michael Hasted 14th December 2024
Here We Live and Now continues until 20th December
