Reykjavík Grapevine - 24.08.2012, Side 48

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48 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 13 — 2012DANCE
Dans dúettar
Essentially Powerful Dance duets from
graduates of P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels
16
AUG
Gaflarleikhúsið
Hafnarfjörður
www.parts.be Like dancing? So do we! And guess what: The Reykjavík Dance Festival
is currently underway! Learn more at www.reykjavikdancefestival.is!
Three students who graduated from the prestigious Perform-ing Arts Research & Training
Studio in Belgium this year are the
first Icelanders to do so since renowned
dancer Erna Ómarsdottir in 1998.
They performed at Gaflar Leikhús on
August 16, showing two duets that were
developed during their tenure in the
programme.
FOCuSED MOVEMENTS
In the first piece, ‘Out Of The Body’
Inga Huld Hákonardóttir and Rósa
Ómarsdóttir entered the stage and
stand parallel facing forward in simple
jeans and shirted street clothes. Then
began a segment of facile focused move-
ments, their arms raised akimbo and
curved upward, swinging in half circles
around their heads. This pendulous
repetition led to a series of hummed
letters as they shifted their feet without
raising them to reposition themselves.
The hummed letters revealed them-
selves to be a sentence, a Stravinsky
quote—“music is by its very nature es-
sentially powerless to express anything
at all”—as they began a new rotation of
poses. This sequence was repeated by
each dancer with increasing physical
dissonance between the two, creating
a back-and-forth mantra which could
have effectively carried on for the
entire piece. This also recalled strong
similarities to P.A.R.T.S. co-founder
Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker’s seminal
works set to Steve Reich’s phase music.
This was followed by a much weaker
section of narrative performed by a sin-
gle dancer, which seemed unfortunately
convoluted and irrelevant to the work’s
whole. All the while, at the back of the
stage, the other continued performing
a series of callisthenic motions, which
quickly broke between linear and fran-
tic, static to dynamic, firm to loose. An
explanation by the second dancer using
the first as a demonstration model of
each movement they were employ-
ing gave a sense of calculation to the
series which one could re-order each
movement for a new equation. This
also blended the name of the piece well
into itself. The piece culminated with
both dancers repeating the sequence
again intermittently fast-slow-fast to a
loud house music track that went on too
long and lost dramatic effect, but was
memorable nonetheless.
OLyMPIC SPORTS RE-ENACTED
After an almost imperceptible break,
the second pair of dancers entered the
stage for ‘Natural Order Is A Special
Case.’ One followed the other and took
an almost identical stance to the begin-
ning of the first piece, except with the
marked exaggeration of their shad-
ows. Védís Kjartansdóttir and Louis
Combeaud (from France) then launched
into singing a da-da-dum-dum style
impersonation of a bombastic baroque
piece before relocating themselves to
different parts of the stage and singing
again at different volumes and speed in
casual determination until they were
each standing at one extreme of the
stage.
Védís broke from this suddenly into
a rapid, disjointed sequence travelling
across the stage quickly in leaps and
low angular shifts, as Louis then fol-
lowed suit with an equally intricate and
physically demanding, yet humourous,
passage. Both returned to their posi-
tions and yet again began this previous
part which seamlessly f lowed into a
grandiose display of athletics and mim-
icry. Both dancers calculatingly circling
the stage area at its outer reaches, facing
each other and silently performing what
at times looked like mirrored-image
tasks to empty handed re-enactments of
elementary games or Olympic sports.
PARADIGMS
Just as sudden and subtlely, both were
nearly at stage front and breaking the
fourth wall not just by facing towards
the audience, but by looking into it with
coy lechery, their left shoulders and
hips just slightly swaying. The small
movements spoke to something bigger,
the anticipation created by restraint
which paid off in full with a finale of
synced, wide-breadth slalom jumps. Set
to the same tune they hummed at the
onset, with their leaps getting higher
and wider and their facial expressions
revealing true delight, the performance
ended quite abruptly as the music
turned off, they ceased their jumps and
finished the song themselves.
Both performances followed similar
paradigms in terms of structure and
in their tone of lightness without being
overtly comical, yet the second was
better accomplished as a whole and
held the engagement of the viewer by
the dancers’ skill. A close eye should be
kept on all of these dancers in years to
come.
- REBECCA LOuDER
“
Both performances
followed similar
paradigms in terms
of structure and in
their tone of light-
ness without being
overtly comical, yet the
second was better ac-
complished as a whole
and held the engage-
ment of the viewer by
the dancers’ skill. All of
these dancers should
be kept a close eye on
in years to come.”.
„