KVT – 5 Star Dance with Four Bright Stars

KVT starry eyed over a dance Without Stars at Youth Theater

The 5 star arts highlight of the month was at the Youth Theater on Wednesday night last week with James Cousin’s Contemporary Dance Company presenting two of their highly acclaimed works.

The company is from the UK, on a swing through South East Asia promoted by The British Council.

Choreographer Cousins honed his dancing skills when on world tour with Mathew Bourne’s interpretation of Swan Lake in which the swans were males, that premiered in 1995 and is still touring and is probably the most popular ballet productions and that always makes the hair on the back of my neck rise whenever I catch a glimpse of it. Cousins went on to win major choreography awards and founded a company in his own name….which is a pretty stellar thing for a youngish ex dancer to do. To prove that he’s not a flash in the pan fluke, his company has won accolades in serious contemporary dance circles world wide

We got his company of four dancers who had been co-opted specifically to create a new dance…strong, muscular dancers able to make acrobatic moves used by gymnasts and circus performers flow into seamless dance lines….brilliantly.

The name of the piece dancing Without Stars is a rather nice PR take on that pretty dreadful TV series Dancing With The Stars.

Those thus intrigued may be even more intrigued to find that Cousins has taken his theme from Murikami’s first novel ‘Norwegian Wood’. Murikami, in turn, elaborated his themes around the lyrics by John Lennon in the song of the same name (both book and song subtitled That Bird Has Flown)

The rapacious aspects of some human relationships are a theme Murikami tackles in many of his novels. In men it is a predatory instinct that can manifest itself as violence against women- and in women the subtle predatory aspects of his female characters, who inflict psychological violence, often on emotionally challenged young men.

Not that you needed to be au fait with Murakami or Lennon to be able to sit glued to Cousin’s engulfing choreography but most engrossed viewers soon came to terms with the themes that Murakami developed in Norwegian Wood and elaborated on in later novels. A particular theme pertinent to the night’s program was that humans have to learn the hard way that emotional dependence is not love.

The stunningly effective musical score was book ended and infiltrated by the Mills Brothers evergreen ‘You Always Hurt the One You Love’

And a highlight of the many excellent highlights was the sensuous, balanced pas de deux between two male ‘lovers’ too beautifully danced as the song span. Passionate!

The main protagonist was drawn between two contrasting characters.

One is all too fragile and still dependent on the memory of a deceased lover…who is represented by the black figure who acts as conscience, enticer, devils advocate, and emotional crutch for the Japanese female dancer. This phantom figure allows her to perform almost impossible moves in a superb pas de quatre. Perhaps this phantom is used as the guide that Murikami often uses to lead his readers through the shadowy and chilly aspects of death and grief and abuse

The other character, vivacious and energetically alive and sparking offers the vacillating central dancer a chance to escape the half life he’s trapped inside.

Murikami always offers his characters the chance of redemption or rebirth but the reader is never sure which path the character takes and this is also what is on offer in Cousin’s 45 minute dance where we are drawn into a tension that hypnotically builds on tension, often giving way to mental instability, anger and hopelessness.. By the end of the dance we are still not sure if the protagonist grabs hold of the proffered chance to take another of life’s great risks towards emotional fulfillment or if he remains in the nether world of dependency on bygone memory and lost love.

The second unmissable dance of the evening was Cousin’s world famous ‘There We Have Been’

Famous because the female dancer is held suspended above the floor for 17 minutes, demanding intense strength from both the female and her male partner.

The two dancers for and around whom the dance was choreographed, have been superseded in the tour and the phantom and the female. enthused about previously. had the dance arrangrd around their amazing abilities

This dance, also choreographed from a passage in Norwegian Wood, is an almost too intense look at a co-dependency relationship

At first we are not sure if the female is being kept against her will in a relationship and therefore not allowed her freedom, metaphored in not being allowed to ground herself

The couple entwines and then the female flows into swinging arcs around her support. Then you slowly realize that although she is folding herself around his form she always seems to be trying to reach for something or someone in the shadows. You notice that their eyes occasionally glance into each others. After this when they tentatively try to make themselves come into more intimate contact they hesitantly stop and move around each other in divorced movements.

Then we wonder if the male is supporting the female, desperately wanting to escape but trapped by her needs. Wanting to escape a cloistering but emotionally destructive dependency.

When the piece ends with the male leaving the dance with soulful backward glances, and the female, torso highlighted, suspended in darkness without any visible means of support, we don’t know who we should feel most relief for…. or if either would ever be able to accept and nurture a seed of rebirth

FROM NORWEGIAN WOOD:

‘My arm was not the one she needed, but the arm of someone else. My warmth was not what she needed, but the warmth of someone else.

I felt almost guilty being me.

As the winter deepened, the transparent clarity of Nako’s eyes seemed to increase. It was a clarity that had nowhere to go’

BRILLIANT EVENING’S DANCE….with big thanks to the British Council for bringing the company to us

A trailer about Cousin’s original There We Have Been