The Novel Hall Dance 2010 series did not get off to an auspicious start. One of Emanuel Gat’s dancers fell ill, so Rite of Spring had to be scrapped. When you are just a 10-member company, understudies don’t exist.
What Taipei audiences got in exchange was extraordinary — an expanded version of Gat’s 2004 Winter Voyage duet with Roy Assaf, a 50-minute piece called Winter Variations that premiered in June last year.
The show opened with Silent Dance. It was a good introduction to the company and to Gat’s minimalist style. The company was attired in T-shirts, pants and shorts, largely in shades of gray, which proved to be the color scheme for most of the program.
Gat is credited with the choreography, the lighting and the costumes for all his pieces, so he obviously sees a world that is less black-and-white and more an ever-shifting palette of gray that runs the gamut from ashy-white to almost black. It is a deceptive simplicity helps the audience to focus on the reason they’re there: Gat’s choreography.
The curtain rose on Silent Dance with the eight dancers lined up along the back of one-half of the stage. One woman strode forward, took a position and then began to move. At first the dancers stayed to one half of the stage, but they soon moved out across the floor, eyes always on one another, measuring pace, measuring space, even if they were just centimeters apart.
In Silent Dance the only sounds you hear are the squeaks of feet moving across the floor, the thumps of multiple feet landing at the same time, the dancers’ breathing. The choreography is a swirl of kicking legs and arms, a solo here, a duet there, sometimes several dancers echoing or mirroring the moves of another — and then a sudden pause for a tableau.
Six men and two women, and the most amazing thing was how real they looked, like average people you might see on the street as opposed to, say, the sleek whippets of Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance who appeared at Novel Hall last year.
When the stage went dark, the dancers moved off to a round of applause and you could just make out the figures of two dancers taking their marks on stage. When the lights went up, Gat and Assaf, garbed in long, sleeveless tunics over black pants, began the 14-minute Winter Voyage, set to three lieders by Franz Schubert.
The synchronicity between the two men was amazing to watch, the fluidity of their movements enhanced by the rippling skirts of their long tunics. They flowed seamlessly around the stage, sometimes doing a kind of hop, skip, jump and turn with their arms raised and fists held at chest level, graceful masculinity at its best.
Winter Voyage ended when the men walked to the back of the stage, now dark, stripped off their tunics and put on gray T-shirts and shoes. That was the first of just two breaks they got (the second was another T-shirt change and a sip of water) before launching into Winter Variations, a duet that builds in layers and soars into wonderful mix of playfulness and melancholy, set to music that segues from a menacing industrial drone to the Beatles A Day in the Life, to an Egyptian song by Riad al-Sunbati to a piece by Gustav Mahler.
Just as it is hard to imagine anyone combining just disparate musical genres into one work, it’s hard to believe that just two men can hold an audience’s attention for almost a full hour. But the pair of them did.
For the Beatles, the choreography was playful, with something of ballroom partnership to it. Then there was a dramatic shift to their knees, as the two men shuffle-walked across and around the stage, each imbuing the movement with their own style. Twice Gat “sat” on a half-bent Assaf, legs wrapped around his calves, as Assaf “walked” him to the back of the stage. The awkwardness of those segments served to enhance the grace of the others.
It was a virtuoso performance by two amazing dancers that left the audience stunned. Any disappointment in not seeing Rite of Spring was quickly forgotten — although Elaine Huang (黃麗宇), Novel Hall’s public relations manager, said Cloud Gate Dance Theatre founder Lin Hwai-min (林懷民), the dance series’ artistic director, has already invited Gat to come back and bring Rite with him.
That probably won’t happen until 2012, but judging by Saturday night’s show it will be well worth the wait.
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