Wim Vandekeybus's last show used an all-male cast to explore a charged, delicate and sometimes very funny world of men's dreams and desires. His new piece, Scratching the Inner Fields, is performed by women. Yet it fails to get under the skin and psyches of its cast to anything like the same extent.
The terrain it attempts to chart is that of post- apocalyptic science fiction. Peter Verhelst's text, spoken in fragments by the cast of eight dancers and actors, describes a future in which people's bodies are being invaded by strange plant life, and possessed by disturbing heat and desires.
On Friday night the show was received with rapturous applause. It is easy to appreciate why, given the nightmarish beauty of some of its staging. There is one woman, for instance, who wanders around with one silver-painted hand encased in a box. When she lovingly lifts it out to polish it, the hand starts to behave like a demented Fury, beating her face and body with a violence exaggerated by heavy, rustling amplification.
Another woman speaks to us in a keening, guttural voice, and as she does so stalks of blossoms push up through her hair, as if she is sprouting and mutating before our eyes. During the course of the show the performers get covered in mud and blood and the choreography itself features moments of terrifying and self-immolating abandon as the dancers twist and jackknife under the discomfort of their newly invaded bodies.
Yet powerful as individual details are, the work doesn't add up. Most obviously problematic are some long and surprisingly dull sections of trademark Vandekeybus moves, which tell us nothing about the performers or their stories. But what is ulti mately most dispiriting is the show's failure to be more than a spectacle. The cast may be performing to the hilt, yet we feel no differently about them at the end of the piece than we did at the beginning. Just as there is no central metaphor driving the show, so there is no dynamic theatrical push that makes us feel part of a collective event. The fear and the energy are furiously visible, but it is as if they are on display behind thick glass.
