To write about contemporary dance is to sometimes find yourself wondering whether the emperor is wearing any clothes. Is this a profoundly game-changing performance, or just someone messing about on stage?
Tonight the emperor is actually wearing jazzy monochrome cycling shorts, and she’s lying on the floor, in silence, with dimly-lit photos of walls and window ledges projected behind her. Later, the emperor – AKA Greek choreographer Georgia Vardarou – wears a gold poncho, or rather she crawls underneath it to become an inert metallic nugget. Nothing much happens after that.
Vardarou is performing as part of this year’s Dance Umbrella festival, and comes anointed by Belgium’s high priestess of contemporary dance, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, as part of the Four by Four project. To mark 40 years of Dance Umbrella, four major names of international dance have chosen their “choreographer of the future”. Akram Khan has already picked bharata natyam dancer Mythili Prakash, and next year will see commissions from Jon Maya Sein (nominated by Rocío Molina) and Abby Zbikowski (nominated by Stephen Petronio). Vardarou was the choice of De Keersmaeker, who called her “a beautifully different choreographer”.
Vardarou’s world premiere is titled Why should it be more desirable for green fireballs to exist than not? Green fireballs are lights in the sky spotted mostly in the US and have been variously thought to be UFOs, Russian spycraft or natural weather phenomena.
There are no flying saucers in Vardarou’s work, but questions of perception, for sure, about what the body can tell us and how we make stories about what we see, though Vardarou gives her audience very little to work with. She crosses the stage a few times in a chain of unembellished poses, a bit like a flexi-limbed doll trying out all its permutations. Then she mostly gives up on moving altogether.
There’s a certain strand of European dance that loves to keep its concepts convoluted and its performance unrewarding. Vardarou leaves gaps for the audience to fill. If alien conspiracists teach us anything, it’s that, when there isn’t an obvious answer, we can always come up with something more fantastical to fill the void. So, if Vardarou’s work does nothing for you, is that a failure of the artist’s creativity or the viewer’s? Is this a skilfully conceived challenge to the imagination, or someone with a deadline who ran out of ideas? Take your pick.
