Since it was created six years ago by Scapino dancer Maya Roest and former Scapino principal dancer Mischa van Leeuwen, RIDCC (Rotterdam International Duet Choreography Competition) has rapidly grown to become an internationally celebrated dance event. It offers several prizes, the most prestigious of which is the RIDCC XL Production award of €100,000, the biggest and most prestigious of its type in the world, to be spent on a new and original piece for Scapino.
Winners of the 2023 XL award – Sarah Baltzinger & Isaiah Wilson along with the 2022 winner Olivia Court Mesa, are presenting their pieces in Origin which opened last night at Theater Rotterdam. Both are performed in one programme with two connecting dance films curated by Cinedans film festival around the same theme of absurdist satire and a search for hope in dark times.
Absurdism with a small “a” is the philosophical concept that the universe is irrational and without meaning. Absurdism with a capital “A” was a movement in the 1950s and 1960s which, with the likes of Albert Camus in literature and Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett in theatre, explored that theory. The irrational had already been demonstrated by Dada, and randomness by the Surrealists. But did any of this come any closer to expanding our understanding of our lives? The four pieces in Origin gave us their best shot.
The programme started, as it meant to continue with Fibonacci, a brilliant and beautiful short film. Produced in Czechia, the film brought together an international creative team, including French choreographer Marie Gourdain and performers from Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, and Russia. As you will no doubt know, the Fibonacci sequence is one of those amazing mathematical phenomenon that, in nature, provides more meaning and logic than humanity ever can.
The film opens with the camera panning across random greyish brown textured shapes, curves and lines that make us think we are looking at an abstract painting. Suddenly there is movement as a tractor appears and it is clear we are looking at a strange isolated landscape. A group of about a dozen of figures appear, all dressed in white, running seemingly at random. They perform informal manoeuvres sometimes together, sometimes splitting into smaller groups. Then a hunter drives up in his truck and climbs up into a rickety observation tower with his shotgun . . .
The Breakable Us erred on the side of surrealism. The beach-like décor had an ephemeral, dreamlike quality, like an early Max Ernst painting, consisting of a ship’s sail and a floor lamp suspended from above, a tilting cupboard, a collection of two or three-legged wooden chairs and a broken table.
Strength is almost the byword of Chilean-Israeli Olivia Court Mesa and in The Breakable Us she combines athletic physical strength with conceptual depth. Through a series of complicated cat’s-cradle sequences the five dancers explore the idea that trauma is an inseparable part of our humanity from which we heal and become a new version of ourselves – trauma as a source for growth.
The second half of the evening started with another short film. Emma Evelein’s Lucid Dreaming is set in a railway/subway carriage as it sways and rumbles through the night. A lone girl finds herself surrounded by cyber-punk/zombie characters as she loses herself in the world of a stranger sitting across from her. Sometime violent, often scary, it conjures up images of which nightmares are made. Lucid Dreaming won the Golden Calf for Best Short Film at the Netherlands Film Festival 2023.
The cinema screen rose to reveal the theatre’s back-stage area in its entirety. We saw the ropes, cables, ladders and lights as stage hands wandered around putting the final touches to the set which sat neatly in the middle of the huge playing area. One of them paced backwards and forwards mowing the lawn of which the décor consisted. It was like one of those mini urban sports fields lit by floodlights. The seven dancers appeared in more of less sporty outfits, taking us through a series of set pieces many of which were very funny. Sarah Baltzinger and Isaiah Wilson’s Goats is an imaginative satire on contemporary times exploring the conflict between the herd instinct and desire of the individual to assert itself. In a strange way it was very much like the Fibonacci film with which the evening started and, again, telling you how the piece ended would be a spoiler.
Origin provided four perfectly matching and beautifully executed pieces which, while maybe not revealing the meaning of life, highlighted its absurd aspects and provided us with a very entertaining and satisfying evening.
The first night was also a sort of informal farewell to Maya Roest who is leaving Scapino Ballet after seventeen years to concentrate on RIDCC together with Mischa van Leeuwen. Michael Hasted 27th February 2025
Origin will tour the Netherlands until 11th April and return at the beginning of June with dates in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht.
