In private, Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard often referred to each other as Mandril and Mongoose – animal characters in a playful fantasy of courtship. In her short story Lappin and Lapinova, however, Woolf wrote a far more sardonic version of that marital fantasy, portraying a mismatched couple who can only ever find happiness while pretending to be a rabbit and a hare.
Woolf’s story has been reinvented by choreographer Ben Duke and writer Lucy Kirkwood into a strikingly elegant and funny piece of dance theatre. From the outset, the couple’s incompatibilities are translated into clear physical terms. While the woman (Louise Tanoto) is withdrawn and mysterious, the man (Duke) is all crude, scattered exhibitionism, pumping his pelvis and chest as he dances around her. It’s clearly sexual high-jinks he’s hoping for, when she draws him into her game of Lappin and Lapinova.
But Like Rabbits evolves as a far more subtle fantasy, one that’s partly narrated by text, but is vividly legible in the choreography. Tanoto’s bounding jumps and nuzzling tenderness register all the woman’s liberated joy in her new leporid self. Duke is very funny as her game, if bemused, partner. With the two of them dressed in dappled and furry unitards, we’re drawn into the fantasy’s fragile allure and the end, when it comes, is both shocking and poignant.
While the man inevitably grows bored of being Lappin, the woman cannot stop. Lapinova has consumed her and the process through which Tanoto embodies that transformation is extraordinary. Sinking down on her haunches, her delicate body quivering, her eyes glisteningly wide, she seems to physically morph from woman to hare. Tanoto is in fact a temporary understudy, but in this role she delivers one of the most hauntingly detailed displays of dance acting I’ve seen all year.
