Salamon / Le Roy / Christiane Muller, The Place, London
Your support helps us to tell the story
This election is still a dead heat, according to most polls. In a fight with such wafer-thin margins, we need reporters on the ground talking to the people Trump and Harris are courting. Your support allows us to keep sending journalists to the story.
The Independent is trusted by 27 million Americans from across the entire political spectrum every month. Unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock you out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. But quality journalism must still be paid for.
Help us keep bring these critical stories to light. Your support makes all the difference.
So how is the contemporary dance scene in Berlin? If you think only demon dance enthusiasts should want to know, let alone ask the question, then you're being unjustifiably insular. Germany not only has a long modern dance history, it actually gave birth to modern dance in Europe. Through Mary Wigman it exercised an influence on the emergence of its American equivalent. And through choreographers like Kurt Jooss and Pina Bausch it has made its dance theatre style famous throughout the world.
The six-week long "Made in Berlin" showcase, shared by the Barbican Theatre and The Place, has been displaying a slice of today's activity in Berlin. Where Sasha Waltz at the Barbican a fortnight ago was large-scale and high-powered, the season's closing double bill of Salamon/Le Roy and Christiane Müller belonged to the modest end of the spectrum. Was there a new Bausch waiting to emerge in all this? Probably not, but what do I know.
The closing double bill showed that financially strapped independents in Berlin are not much different from their equivalents in Britain. Their language has the same generic quality of transforming gestural and pedestrian moves into choreography.
In Giszelle, a solo choreographed by Xavier Le Roy and Eszter Salamon (who also performs), this language is diversified by familiar, iconic postures - the Michael Jackson's moon walk, John Travolta dancing in Saturday Night Fever, the lumbering, arm-swinging stance of an ape.
Giszelle runs through a catalogue of snapshots covering several million years of human movement, framed in the music and ballet phrases of that stereotypical romantic ballet, Giselle. Salamon's performance is something of a tour de force, in a low-key, informal manner, where costuming (any old jeans and T-shirt), make-up (non-existent) and decor (absent) cost nothing.
That is the presentation chosen by many contemporary dance practitioners, including the same bill's Christiane Müller for Two Fish. Reportedly choreographed in a private flat, where even the bathroom and hallway were used as performance spaces, Two Fish portrays five individuals who might make up the inhabitants.
They speak about themselves - their histories, their worries, their interests - they dance, they gradually come together, their differences united by the common bond of daily human life. They might be us, we might be them. It is engaging stuff, performed with spirit and naturalness. Not headline-making, but not a waste of space either.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments