The French choreographer Boris Charmatz took over Tate Modern last week, transforming it into what he calls a Musée de la danse, through which audiences were free to roam. There were installations, huge-scale participation pieces, reworked stage works, and a human dance archive, in which performers danced key works from the modernist canon.
On Sunday Charmatz relocated to Sadler’s Wells, with the presentation of his 1996 work Aatt enen tionon. This is a piece for three dancers – Charmatz himself, Matthieu Burner, and Lénio Kaklea – each of whom occupies a tier of an open-sided tower, positioned centre stage with the audience free to move around it.
The dancers cannot see each other, and each has a limited floor area, perhaps four square metres, on which to manoeuvre. Kaklea is on the top tier, and you are conscious of the precariousness of her situation: were she to fall, the consequences would be dire.
After a short introductory period, during which PJ Harvey’s music plays, all three performers strip naked except for a white T-shirt. Their movements, performed in silence, are at once precise and brutal. Loose kicks, arbitrary-looking freezes, thumping falls.
Their expressions are remote; they acknowledge neither the audience nor each other. Nudity in dance is always loaded, always more than absence of costume. Often it’s born of a kind of messianic puritanism: the conviction, on the part of the choreographer, that the audience, in some sense, needs “liberating”. But this isn’t Charmatz’s game at all.
What Charmatz appears to be playing with here is paradox. The choreography is at once formal and formless, taking place only when the music stops. The performers’ naked genitals are emphasised – indeed, made the explicit focus of attention – by the skimpy white T-shirts. The three figures have the rawness and the fleshly vulnerability of paintings by Egon Schiele. Yet while you think you see everything, you see nothing, because the dancers are so utterly detached, so elsewhere.
The stage space is lit by three floating globes, like dying moons. It’s as if the tower is the whole world, lost in the vastness of space.
So do these lonely, preoccupied figures represent us all? Foolish semi-naked animals, wilfully marooned in our own tiny spaces? The dancers could, in theory, reach out to each other, link arms, lock gazes, speak, connect. But contained as they are by the force-field of their self-absorbtion, they don’t do any of these things. They literally and figuratively stand on their hands.
It took me some time to work out the piece’s title, which I assumed was drawn from one of the many European languages I don’t speak. In fact, I realised, it’s a dragged out version of the French word Attention! (Look!). At intervals of about 10 minutes the dancers intone one of the syllables, slowing the sound so that it’s effectively meaningless. We’re being ordered to look, in the most oblique terms possible, when there’s nothing to do except look. Yet looking, as we’ve discovered, is not necessarily seeing.
Of course there’s another, rather less French, way of looking at this piece: that’s it’s three people doing 40 minutes of fairly random stuff without any pants on.
And there was the odd moment, I have to admit, when it looked like that to me.
