BEIRUT – The Linga Company’s “Falling Grace,” featuring Polish and Italian artists Katarzyna Gdaniec and Marco Cantalupo, is dance fragmented.
Staged at the Masrah al-Madina Saturday evening as part of the Beirut International Platform of Dance (BIPOD), the 60-minute performance was subdivided into distinctive chapters.The piece opens with calm and accelerates into chaos. Two men and three women stand in a circle. A few grave piano notes sound and the five confront one another with increasing violence. The piano accompaniment turns ever louder and more strident.
Seven lamps are rolled on stage changing the monochrome lighting into dazzling white light. A female dancer, wearing only flesh-colored tights, raises her left arm. Her right leg follows. The fourth part of the piece – a duet revolving around a man and a woman – is the most theatrical of the performance. Dressed in simple costumes, the performance mixes dramatic separation, with bodies violently torn apart, and passionate reunion with embracing arms wide open toward the other.
The female dancer utters a few words to her partner in some European language, then turns her back upon him. He runs after her and holds her. The two bodies are now one, turning around the stage, in successive leaps.
In the fragments that follow, a female dancer appears onstage, her head completely covered in a mask-lamp. A man then appears with a silver bar attached to his buttocks. The dancers’ bodies twist, their bodies and convulse, as if to signify the discomfort of having lamp and metal bar affixed to the body.
At the close of the show a dancer – who had earlier appeared in an extravagant, lamp-dodging solo performance, returns to the stage dressed as a sophisticated woman wearing a dress from the Baroque era with red high-heeled shoes. The others hold her, then push her to her feet to dance.
“Falling Grace” features several different styles of dance – from classical pointes and pirouettes to modern acrobatic movement – perhaps inspired by the experience of Gdaniec (the choreographer) as a competitive gymnast.
This eclectic show is reminiscent of work dance icon Maurice Bejart, insofar as it combines different artistic worlds to stage a spectacle. Gdaniec entered Béjart’s Ballet du XX Siècle in 1985 and remained with the company as principal dancer until 1991. Cantalupo was a soloist at the Béjart Ballet Lausanne.
“Falling Grace” is a tribute to disequilibrium. Dancers’ bodies suddenly stand, jump into the air, transcending the laws of gravity, then tragically fall on the floor. The thundering sound of bodies collapsing upon the wooden stage punctuates the show, reminding the audience of our frailty – frailty being a state of grace.
Gdaniec and Cantalupo’s choreography illustrates the tension between extremes. The precarious stability of the bodies – whether they are tiptoeing on small generator lamps or seeming to stand steadily in the air, carried in the arms of another dancer – confronts the perilous instability with the constant fall of the artists.
At times the dancers’ slow, fluid movement resembles the naturally elegant motion of fish. Throughout the show, these movements evolve to a jerky and frantic choreography.
Similarly, the physical and psychological relationship among the dancers is unstable. Most of the time, they face one another, highlighting the individual skills of each soloist. Nonetheless, there is a single moment in the show during which all the dancers perform the same choreography, in harmony.
The continual imbalance between the bodies enables them to renew and recreate themselves.
Finally, the show worked with the tension between the “natural” and the alien. Like any dance work, it embodied the perfection of the body, as an indisputable form of expression. The sublime purity of each movement is opposed to the impure silver material of the lamp-mask affixed to a dancer’s head and the bar protruding from another artist’s back.
It can be difficult for the neophyte to decipher such a piece which, at times, does look (and sound) awkward. Still, it is impossible not to appreciate, and be entertained by, the power and energy shared by the dancers.
The Beirut International Platform of Dance (BIPOD) and the Arab Dance Platform continue until April 30.
A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on April 18, 2011, on page 16.
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