Dance: Where the French keep their souls
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.A shuddering female sigh heralds the French company's latest show, and the ensuing, pleasured whimperings are a pretty good précis of the next 80 minutes. There have always been two sides to the French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj. On the one hand he's the trendy philosopher who loads his dances with wordy ideas, on the other, the instinctual artist bent on proving that there are some things only bodies can articulate. On paper, Near Life Experience, the work that arrived at the Brighton Festival on Tuesday before moving on to London, seems to belong to the first category. Its theme, Preljocaj says, is "the eclipse of the self, a quest for an imaginary amnios, an expression of the space left by the body when the soul is elsewhere." The result is a whole lot sexier.
The company's 11 dancers, modishly déshabillé, drift through a series of languorous groupings suggesting those moments of sensory experience so intense that the mind lets go. In an opening solo lasting several minutes, a dancer perched high on a lifeguard's chair slithers very slowly to the floor like warm ice-cream. Two dancers hover luminously above islands of glass. Another tumbles like a bundle of feathers. Each ensuing image seems powered not by will, but by a communal surrender to sensation.
While many of these sequences suggest highs of pleasure, some home in on other extremes. In one section the dancers are convulsed in mental agony, their faces contorted in Munch-like screams. In another, a girl is repeatedly jerked onto the tips of her toes from a state of crumpled collapse, a disturbing kind of faint in reverse. It's this image, I think, that most closely correlates to the titular near-death experience, the sensation that coma victims have described of departing their own bodies, and being tugged back to earth as if on a string.
Commissioning a soundtrack from the French trance-rock duo Air must be Preljocaj's most inspired idea. Sometimes their music tracks the somnolent progress of the movement - weaving a delicate skein of melody around two drowsy lovers' embrace, or blissing out in pure white noise. At other times it adds welcome momentum with a wall of thrashing pulse.
By its nature, Near Life... is a dancework going nowhere, and its lack of development and slow pace leaves spectators either beatific or bored to death. To my surprise I enjoyed the general inertia. Above all I was intrigued by the suggestive use of glass - especially a luminous duet involving bodies studded with wine goblets, creating an unbreachable halo. The entranced Brighton audience hooted approval.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments