This was a great initiative and I’m sure one that will catch on and become a regular event – lunchtime performances. Everyone who works in the city centre takes a midday break and, as an alternative sitting on a lonely bench with some boring sandwiche, the Korzo beckons with not only the chance to see some fine dancing but also have an opportunity to have a meal included, killing two birds with one stone as we say. Time isn’t an issue as the shows only last half an hour giving you plenty of time to see the show and have something to eat, all under the same roof before having to hurry back to the office. Brilliant.
The first lunchtime performance was the premiere of Tender Resistance, a brand new work by Leo Spreksel Award-winning choreographer Faizah Grootens. This is the first work she has made for Korzo as an artist-in-residence. Vulnerability, temperament and fluid movements run as common threads through her work. She previously made While you’re here – Tanten bo t’aki for Here We Live and Now 2022, and last year she presented the full-length performance Corpus Criolla at CaDance Festival.
Tender Resistance explores the power of tenderness, how to keep softness in your body in an ever hardening world. Ms Grootens asks, “How do you continue to open yourself up to others, even when you disagree?” Inspired by speeches and interviews by actress Viola Davis and the sensitivity of Papiamentu, the Portuguese-based creole language spoken in the Dutch Caribbean, Faizah explores how complicated it is to remain vulnerable in a world full of conflict and harshness.
The two dancers, Evelien Jansen and Amber Veltman are ideally matched for the piece, one tall and in dark costume, the other shorter, dressed in light colours. The piece opens with one of them balanced on her head, hand by her side and totally rigid. Faizah proceeds like a sculptor, eliminating and chipping away until a pure line remains. That sculptural clarity never becomes predictable, however, because her intuition and her Caribbean roots are the source of the distinctive flow in her work. One sculptural aspect that really worked well was the use of shadows projected onto the vast back wall of the Korzo stage. This created another dimension to an already multi-faceted work. The fluid movement of the two dancers, sometimes harmonious, sometimes confrontational, created, along with the fine soundscape by Michael Lampe and sensitive lighting by Lisette van der Linden, a piece to set one thinking.
Fine though Mr Lampe’s music was, for me the best sequence involved a short silence followed by the voice of Elia Isenia reciting in Papiamentu, a text by Nathania Engelhardt.
Faizah Grootens’ Tender Resistance provided an excellent first piece for the lunch-time performance initiative and if the subsequent shows are as good, Korzo will be onto a winner, and sell a lot of pizzas too. Michael Hasted 14th January2025
