Aurélien Bory is a Toulouse-based choreographer working at the intersection of dance, circus and visual art. In Plexus, he encloses the Japanese dancer Kaori Ito in a forest of tensioned vertical cables. It’s as if she’s in a transparent cuboid cage. We can see her, but her image is blurred by the shimmer of Arno Veyrat’s lighting as it moves across the cables.
Ito strains against these confines, writhing, flailing and hurling herself against the cables. Every sound is hugely amplified, so with her every movement we are assailed by a high-tensile jangling and groaning. At intervals she subjects her environment to furious challenge, racing backwards and forwards within the limited inner space so that the cage rocks on its axis. At other times she positions herself between the cables so that they bear her weight, and hangs there like an exhausted insect, faintly articulating her limbs.
It’s all very beautiful. Veyrat washes the stage in dim gold, floods it with darkness, then directs a raking light across it so that Ito vanishes behind a fine, silvery cross-hatching, like rain. Stéphane Ley’s sound, if at times over-amplified, recalls the “thousand twangling instruments” that hum about Caliban’s ears in The Tempest. In technical and design terms, Plexus is a masterclass.
But as theatre it’s unresonant. Are we watching a birth metaphor? The struggle of the individual to transcend the limitations of human existence? Whatever. The piece belongs to the increasingly prevalent strand of dance theatre that provides a set of exquisite and apparently significant effects in the hope that meaning will somehow accrue, or be ascribed to it by audiences. What you actually get, as here, is the illusion of meaning. A dazzling web of craft that may be “artistic”, but isn’t art. Art risks unloveliness. Plexus plays it safe.
