Sadler's Wells, London
Alain Platel is a choreographer and the founder of the Belgian new wave dance company Les Ballets C de la B, and Frank van Laecke is a theatre director. Together they have created Gardenia, a work inspired by the film Yo soy as�, which documents the last days of a transvestite cabaret in Barcelona. Gardenia assembles a cast of seven drag artists, all of them retired and most of them in their 70s, a woman in her 40s and a younger male dancer.
We first encounter the cabaret artists as men, dressed in dapper, dated suits. They are introduced by the transsexual actress Vanessa Van Durme, a gravel-voiced Baby Jane. "Here's Lily Fuck-Me-Silly," Van Durme declaims of one elderly figure. "And Gina del Rio ? she's got a cunt like Victoria station, open 24 hours, the world and his wife has been through it." The disconnection between the sprightly lasciviousness of her words and the grave dignity of her fellow performers is poignant. They look trussed up, bemused and lost, and shuffle blankly around to the sound of soupy, sentimental strings.
But the music soon gets grander, swooping into Verdi's La traviata as, with a ponderous lowering of underclothes and an awkward hauling on of sequinned frocks, the cast get glammed up. The stereotypes are familiar ones ? the flapper, the Teutonic vamp, the tragic chanteuse, the wide-eyed ingenue ? but there's a touching sweetness about them, and it's impossible not to be moved as the music segues from Puccini into Jay-Z's haunting "Forever Young". The section closes with a grand d�fil� to Ravel's Bol�ro ("Who doesn't remember this lovely melody by Schubert?" one lipsticked siren rather wildly demands), and you begin to wonder where Platel and van Laecke can take the piece from here.
I had assumed that we might hear some of the performers' stories. Tales, perhaps, of suppressed selves, of lives lived in secret, of dreams finding expression in a twilight world. But Platel and van Laecke play it differently and the piece's central section launches with an anguished solo for 26-year-old Timur Magomedgadzhiev to Charles Aznavour's "Comme ils disent", with its despairing chorus of: "Je suis un homo, comme ils disent" ("I'm queer, like they say").
The twitchy, self-loathing solo, executed under the expressionless gaze of Van Durme (by now referencing Sunset Boulevard in a turban and sunglasses), becomes a combative duet with Griet Debacker, the cast's only "real" woman.
The pair wrestle and lurch, Magomedgadzhiev repeatedly throwing Debacker away from him and equally compulsively binding himself to her, but in dance terms the section doesn't quite work. As a metaphor for the transvestite condition it's too obvious and overwrought; as choreography it achieves a brutal Pina Bausch-style repetitiveness, but without the stark resonance that the German choreographer would have brought to it (in truth, her ghost stalks the whole piece; Gardenia is Platel in drag as Bausch).
For me, the work's most telling interlude is when Richard "Tootsie" Diereck, a 58-year-old former Antwerp nurse with melancholy equine features, steps up to the microphone as Marlene Dietrich and sings "Sag mir wo die Blumen sind" ("Where Have All the Flowers Gone?"). As an expression of loss it is much more immediate than the rather mawkish request, early in the evening, that we all stand for a minute's silence in memory of drag queens departed.
Platel's choreography has a tendency to overrun, and it feels both predictable and anticlimactic when, at the show's conclusion, we are treated to a recording of Judy Garland delivering "Over the Rainbow" to a house full of ecstatic gay men.
But overall, it's a privilege to spend time with this brave and unusual cast of performers. For Gardenia is not, in essence, about achieving a pastiche of femininity, it's about the act of metamorphosis and, ultimately, about the dream of transcendence. In this, it finds common ground with the romantic ballets of the 19th century, the only wrinkle being that here the yearning prince and his swan queen are one and have a few more miles on the clock than the average romantic hero and heroine. And where do they go when the ballet ends and the curtain falls, if not over the rainbow?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/jul/03/gardenia-review-jennings
No comments:
Post a Comment