What is it about rabbits? From Harvey through Donnie Darko to Lewis Carroll and Watership Down, these small furry creatures have carried all manner of psychological significance. The Swedish choreographer Pontus Lidberg has already made one work called Rabbit, featuring men dressed in long ears and bunny masks, for BalletBoyz in 2016. That carried the compelling logic of a dream. The much-anticipated world premiere of On the Nature of Rabbits at the Venice Dance Biennale, in which Lidberg himself performs alongside a cast of four men and one woman, feels more like stepping into someone’s nightmare.
In a series of fragmented scenes, he creates disturbing vignettes: a boy sleeps while a rabbit attaches blue balloons to his body; a family dances in fluent unison until its youngest member puts on a blue-cheeked mask; a bare-chested man lies on the stage like a pietà; another man weeps through a balloon, the water spurting into a glass that the woman drinks.
Aids and Lidberg’s own relationship with his desire form the bedrock of the piece, and you can see it all there. Punctuating the sadness and the fear are moments of lightness, and a beautiful duet for two men in which each slips through a ladder held between them. Stefan Levin’s fractured score, ranging from the folkloric to disco to melancholic classical, charts the changing moods. Jason Carpenter’s projections of shadowy rabbits add another narrative layer.
The dancing is fluid and supple but nothing quite hangs together. Scene follows scene without momentum, then it ends. There is a curiously unfinished quality to the whole thing. That’s possibly intentional; perhaps Lidberg wants to create an image of an alternative subconscious world beyond reality, but it doesn’t quite land.
The theme of this year’s dance biennale, curated by Wayne McGregor, is Altered States, and there have been a range of impressive works that fit loosely into that envelope, including Pendulum by Lucy Guerin and Matthias Schack-Arnott, where a field of spotlit bells provides both score and landscape for dance, and Michael Keegan-Dolan’s richly energetic Mám, which arrives at Sadler’s Wells in the autumn.
But the most idiosyncratic interpretation was in Materia, from the Italian Andrea Salustri, seen briefly at the London international mime festival. It sounds fabulously unappealing: a man dances with polystyrene. But its invention is spectacular, as Salustri finds endlessly surprising ways to make this overlooked packaging substance dance.
He lets panels of the stuff flex and wobble in the wind from strategically placed fans, or shreds it and throws it in the moving air so that it rains down like a waterfall, or heats it so it buckles and bends in blisters. In one scene, he dances with a floating sheet, barely touching it with his outstretched hand, manipulating it through the air like a two-dimensional partner.
The hour-long semi-installation is structured so that it gathers its own momentum, as the effects become more elaborate. For the finale, Salustri uses microphones, lighting and the omnipresent fans to create an orchestral manoeuvre in the dark, a symphony made from imaginative use of his most basic material. It makes you think about climate catastrophe with its nods to earth, water, wind and fire; but it also makes you marvel at humankind’s sheer imaginative ingenuity.
Star ratings (out of five)
On the Nature of Rabbits ★★★
Materia ★★★★
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