| Tuesday, June 05, 2001 |
Czech/Italian dance theatre company Deja Donne began their first UK tour, supported by Arnolfini Live, by packing out Arnolfini’s theatre space for two nights of exhilarating and refreshing performance, moving the audience to raucous laughter and gasps of horror as the company’s rivalries, in-fighting and need to be loved escalated into mayhem.
Aria Spinta was choreographed and directed by Lenka Flory (Czech Republic) and Simone Sandroni and created and interpreted by performers from Croatia, Italy, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic. Ex-members of Ultima Vez, the company are both technically strong and characterful, engaging directly with the audience in a work that demands the audience’s complicity in the events on stage without intimidating.
He work developed along clear and coherent lines, with strong characters and consistency, sometimes lending a sense of terrible inevitability and nervous expectation (e.g. as the set suddenly began collapsing around the dancers’ ears, lights hurtling down from the ceiling and only just missing the performers, who grimly determined that the show must go on no matter what…) and yet still frequently surprising.
Having seen several inventive uses of Arnolfini’s ‘black box’ space, I was impressed with what the design for this piece had achieved, especially as a touring production. The caving in of false walls, unfurling of backdrop drapes, hurtling down of bits of lighting rig… really unexpected and exciting. The specially collected and written sound score was strong, and established the various moods well, whether the onstage action went with or totally against the music.
OK, so some of the jokes were corny, but the fact is that there was comedy liberally strewn between tragic, aesthetic and athletic moments… this overload (‘spinta’ translates as ‘over the top’) of emotion, exhuberance and calamity, of different qualities and ideas, was really fresh.
Whether seasoned dance critic or just there on spec, everyone I spoke to unreservedly loved this, and with so much to offer, I imagine few people could resist Deja Donne for long.
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