Goldberg Variations is a collaboration between 11 musicians of Scottish Ensemble and five dancers of Andersson Dance, a Swedish company. The project is the brainchild of choreographer-director Örjan Andersson, and its premise is straightforward: to illuminate the 30 short variations that make up JS Bach’s 1741 composition, through dance and movement. Everybody on stage contributes. The musicians play their instruments but also participate in the choreography. We see them walking, shaking their limbs, patting their clothing and capering about, their artless demeanour contrasting with the more disciplined, if equally informal, activities of the dancers. Is all of this enlightening, vis-a-vis the Goldberg Variations? Does it reveal anything that a straightforward concert rendition would not? Does it make the work more approachable?
Andersson’s choreography is certainly, at moments, descriptive of the music. A dancer responds to the rapid bowing of the ensemble’s string instruments with twitchy, stertorous flailing. A more contemplative sequence generates rippling spine rolls and syrupy isolations. An adagio variation sees a dancer incline backwards so that her long hair touches the floor; she quivers there for a moment before a hip contraction draws her head forward and reverses the curve of her spine. Uncontained rushings hither and thither convey the music’s breathless, overspilling optimism. And there’s a message in the awkward immediacy of the musicians’ movements. Classical music may be rigorous in its composition and execution, but that rigour is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The composer’s intention is to make the listener’s spirit soar, which can be a wild and chaotic process.
Ultimately, though, your enjoyment of this performance depends on the degree to which you’re prepared to let Andersson’s imagination displace your own. And if there are moments in which his choreography is physically imitative of aspects of Bach’s music, this is a work that rapidly becomes dependent on whimsy. As it progresses, creative desperation sets in. A step ladder, a clothes rail, cushions and other random-seeming props are brought on stage. Trousers are dragged over heads, body parts are tugged and slapped, someone throws paper tissues into the air, someone else staggers across the stage with her feet jammed into soup bowls. And inevitably, some guy takes all his clothes off and jigs around for a bit. Whatever. This is not the wild and beautiful chaos that you might encounter in a piece by Michael Keegan-Dolan or Theo Clinkard or Pina Bausch. It’s just inconsequential and twee.
If only moderately interesting in itself, Goldberg Variations is interesting as an example of the increasingly prevalent phenomenon of lifestyle art. Essentially this kind of event is about culture signalling. The performance, a carefully curated blend of whimsy, irreverence and light transgressiveness, validates the audience as cultured insiders. The audience, in their turn, validate the performers and creators as artists. It’s the perfect circular economy, and clearly, one that is tempting to choreographers. Whole careers have been built on fashionably weightless work of this kind. But it’s not the real thing, and its faux-naiïf exclusiveness and in-joking is the enemy of the diversity, and the opening-up of high art, to which it pretends.
