East Shadow, Kylián

Jiří Kylián first started working on his new piece East Shadow when Taro Igarashi, the director of the “Aichi Triennale 2013” invited him to create a choreography for the festival. Igarashi explains that part of the festival is a dedication to the legacy of one of the greatest writers of the 20^th century; Samuel Beckett, another part focuses its themes around the tragedy of the 2011 tsunami. Igarashi believes that during this difficult time for Japan it is important to turn their fortunes around by using cutting edge artistic mediums to ponder questions like “where are we standing?” and “what is our current identity?” He supports the idea that art is the most powerful cultural device to summon memories, resurrect hope and create a brighter community atmosphere in the wake of catastrophe.

Kylián’s end product is a tragi-comical multimedia experience based on the obscure passage by Beckett from the opera Neither. He uses a combination of live performance and projected film to explore the difficulties and at times impossibility that we all face in attempting to live with somebody else or even just with yourself. Playing with life and death, reality and nonsense and the idea that if everything we do in life is just nonsense, how we can use that knowledge to demonstrate this nonsense with great conviction.

East Shadow takes its place as a unique jewel in this year’s Budapest Dance Festival. The festival is an important dance event every spring with international guest performances appearing alongside works by Hungary’s own performance companies. This year a central theme has been explored by some of the artists, asking the questions “What happens within a person when left alone in a dramatic situation? What positions, thoughts, and feelings are evoked by complete solitude?” Kylián’s new work also explored these questions and so fits nicely into the festival program.

Its the 23rd of April and I sit in the audience of the second night of the Budapest Dance Festival 2014. As the auditorium starts to fill up, I see that a range of important Hungarian dance personalities have been drawn in by the prestige of Kylián’s name, including Tamás Solymosi, current artistic director of the Hungarian National Ballet, András Almási-Tóth, director of a new opera The Magic Flute and Blanka Fajth, who works rehearsing ballets with the Hungarian National Ballet and is also working with our graduation class on Gyula Harangozó’s Térzene for our final performance in June. Finally and most importantly Kylián himself comes in and sits down in the row directly in front of me.

The performance starts and although it may not eventuate into the kind of work, displaying great feats of technical ability, that people have come to expect from Kylián, it does however present something that I feel is just as important. A complete visual display of art and human expression that is in itself so powerful and engaging for the entire 45 minutes I could not look away. I was left feeling wondrous, ponding deeply what I had just viewed and in turn the meaning of life itself. As I walk away from the theatre I turn to look back at the Müpa Theater lite up at night, with its glass ceiling to floor windows, I can see all of the audience spilling out of the auditorium and flowing down the zigzag steps like excited ants and as I watch this spectacle I wonder if they are all left feeling the same way I am.

It’s very hard to explain this piece in words since it is so visually focused but I will set the scene for you… The left third of the stage is dominated by a black grand piano, played on by Tomoko Mukaiyama, an incredible pianist who has worked with many prestigious orchestras and delves into the visual art scene collaborating with film directors, designers, architects, dancers and photographers. The middle third is a dull grey wall with a door that is just too small to comfortably walk through and a window that is just too high to comfortably see through. The right third is a conjoined second wall that, although throughout the performance appears as an identical copy of the real wall, is in fact a projection screen.

The action begins as Mukaiyama walks on stage, sits down and begins to play an Andantino from a Schubert sonata. The projection comes to life and the audience is thrown into a alternate world filled with bizarre images, interplay between two characters; an elderly man (Gary Chryst) and an elderly woman (Sabine Kupferberg) confined within the oppressive grey room. Their relationship unfolds with a reel of images and short videos displaying the older couple as they drag each other across the floor, walk on upside down chairs, dance against the wall, fall out of the window and a range of other comical acts. At times these scenes are also extenuated by film techniques to slow down, speed up, fast forward or rewind the images adding a mind boggling, surreal feeling to the entire performance.

There is also a particularly interesting manipulation of the shadows created by the dancers, they often appear as 3^rd and 4^th people in the room or create shapes that allude to the personalities and emotions hidden with the normal outline of a human being. One example of this manipulation is a fascinating moment in the projection when the couple’s shadows collapse to the floor and the dancers themselves remain standing.

 The projection continues through the whole performance, but the real dancers, Sabine Kupferberg and Gary Chryst begin to move as well. Their movements are much slower and controlled acting in contrast to the projection, with a focus on their continuously changing facial expressions and in the small details; the placement of a hand, the exchange of their hats or the random appearance of a cactus through the window. This emphasis on detail and absurdity is what i believe to be a typical signature of the Kylián style. However as the dancers and the projection continue to progress, suspense gradually builds up. This is depicted by the shaking of Kupferberg’s hand framed in the window, the endless spinning of a plate on the projection, the piano crescendos and finally the crashing of waves and sounds of explosions that eventuates and overwhelms the audience. Ruff waters and white wash appear alongside the dancers who finally display some short movement sequences before the waves subside, the couple disappear into the audience and everything fades to darkness.