Each man kills the thing he loves, though rarely on the battlefield. Shobana Jeyasingh’s richly layered new dance work draws on a 16th-century epic poem in which the crusader Tancredi kills a valiant Saracen only to discover it’s Clorinda, the woman he loves.
Monteverdi’s scena about this episode is a 20-minute wonder. First staged in a Venetian palazzo in 1624, its driving rhythms represent a musical leap forward – pizzicato conjures metallic sword blows, agitated strings spit sparks for the heat of combat. And Robert Hollingworth’s musicians are suitably bristling.
Darting and lunging through Merle Hensel’s set of slender glass pillars, Jemima Brown makes Clorinda unpredictable, while Jonathan Goddard’s Tancredi is almost foppishly correct, fencing rather than slashing. These exceptional dancers create an electric charge – they leap, kick, roll into exhaustion. With a courtly flourish, Tancredi requests Clorinda’s name; she withholds it, thrusting an elbow to his sternum. Enraged, he delivers the fatal blow with a hug.
Who frames Clorinda’s story? In Monteverdi, a narrator has the lion’s share, and Jeyasingh pushes this further, having tenor Ed Lyon also singing the combatants’ lines. Fervent, fatigued, sorrowing, he voices the encounter’s shifting atmospheres. He crouches like a war reporter as the warriors wrestle and swerve – but is Clorinda’s ecstatic last-breath conversion to Christianity the tale she’d choose to tell?
In a less taut second section, scored by Syrian-American composer Kareem Roustom, four women become avatars of a current Clorinda, scurrying at speed for safety. Unforgiving projections show a devastating, unnamed Middle-Eastern conflict. The pillars, previously banded with Lee Curran’s rich emerald light, turn dark or fill with scarlet. This is how a crusade looks to those caught up in it, less glamorously chivalric than in Monteverdi’s work.
A plangent recorded mezzo sings in Arabic. Goddard and Lyon reappear as a cameraman and sound operator, advancing dispassionately as the women swirl and fall. They too resist being known, arms held over faces, heads turned aside. A line of unknowability, they stride forward in profile, advancing in emphatic jumps. The strings glide, woozy with fatigue, but the women continue. A fable about conversion now concludes in defiance.
