Dance Works Rotterdam presents two pieces of dance by choreographers Guerin and Listopad. In Lucy Guerins "First Days" we see a black dance floor with a white zone in the front that is decorated with white coloured attributes from a students apartment. Guerin gives us a guided tour through her memories of her time as a dance student. In a few chapters she let sex dancers describe everyday situations, such as "alone in my apartment" and "the street" and "meeting people". Unfortunately, the people she meets do not become alive, they remain dead memories, probably because the dancers do not interact. Each chapter is supported with different music. Between the chapters the dancers remain in the white zone. Although I’m not a dance "connaisseur", I clearly recognise traditional modern (= contradiction?) movements. For example, a sequence of movements is started by one dancer, picked up by a second one till a third one joins into a collective synchronised figure. Traditional modern dance movements are nice to see, but have this obvious tendency to be beautiful and that is not always the most interesting. On top of that, the titles of the chapters, the supporting music inevitably makes the audience looking for clues in the movements, and finds them, of course. So sometimes the dancers paint white situations that are already white. First Days is an innocent attempt to paint memories in dance.

The Portuguese Listopad clearly departs from another source. Not his memories but his association with the work of Japanese artist Yayoi Kasuma, has inspired him. Apart from a silver painted kitchen chair and a heap of silver painted shoes, the dance floor is empty and white. Three dancers slowly start to move and to interact. First there’s the girl with the transistor radio, trying to capture signals from Japan :). The movements are inspired by the Japanese Butoh dance idiom: cramped extremities, like the dancers have strong physical disabilities. The positions and movements made me think of creatures that walked straight out of a Francis Bacon tableau. However, Listopad’s dancers seem to suffer less than Bacon's creatures. What I really liked is that the dancers interacted; it provides theatrical power to the piece. When people start to interact they have to really listen and respond. To me, that makes life interesting. Listopad also plays with humour when the chair becomes the fourth dancer and a dancer becomes a chair. The dancers smoothly shifted from the real world to an imaginary abstract world, like they stepped through an invisible wall. I mean, at one point I empathise with a personage and the next moment I’m in Listopad-space. Good dance work. Thank you.

Seen at: Rotterdamse Schouwburg February 11, 2006.

Play list: www.danceworksrotterdam.nl

Butoh: http://www.xs4all.nl/~iddinja/butoh/ned_1.html (in Dutch)