With dancer Shantala Shivalingappa and musician Loïc Schild’s fascinating performance of choreographer and scenographer Aurélien Bory’s Ash, La Scala-Paris continues developing a trademark tone and style, mixing cutting edge contemporary performance with a sharp eye to esthetics and popular entertainment value.
Ash has six virtuouso performers: two people, two sets, a central-stage prop and a scenography: dancer Shantala Shivalingappa, who caresses in the air before the center with figures by her hands and body; the front-stage space transformed by Shivalingappa’s feet; musician-performer Loïc Schild, who fills the air around with tones and variegated beat; the space occupied by Schild’s synthethizer-percussion machine; an elaborate mandala-like center-stage that molts both in color and mood, and form and suggestion; Bory’s spectator-triggered scenographic choreography.
Teasing and scintillating, center-stage seems sometimes to be of the air, sometimes of the earth, sometimes of the sea, sometimes of fire. But its shaping does not also shape the performers or props around it. In its image, these remain virtuosos, unoccupied and un-occupying.
With a body moving as water flows, Shivalingappa performs Kuchipudi-inspired classic Indian dance and, though in front of the center, remains always within her own space, with a distinct identity. With her feet she creates a tracing of her movement. Schild’s music, like Shivalingappa intimately close to the center, makes percussive tones in the air. These, like the dancer’s steps are alone in their own space. The dings, pings and tinkles happen as play happens, becoming short-lived arpeggios and breathy riffs and staying in the space above Schild’s machine just for the second it takes to detonate tinily and disappear. This virtuosity is emphasized by a verticality in the stage design and in the dance of Shivalingappa, which seems to attach a sky-reaching upper body to a perch-like pelvis on legs. Bory’s scenography arranges the proximities, positions and movements of the five other performers, rattling them around inside his feelings for audience expectation.
Then, radiating from an increasing intensity in Shivalingappa’s dance, the scenography uses the searching movement of the spectator’s eye to pluck out a choreography that suggests that the stage is a single sacred space and the performers in it instruments of this sacredness. The choreography hones sound until it is music, shapes movement until it is dance and turns the stage set into a place. By magic, spectator eyes transform the center stage from, first, the “point of sense” to a mandala-like image then to a “sacred center”, then to an “altar”. Tracings of Shivalingappa’s feet, at first lines and squiggles, suggest now the emergence of the labyrinth of the Christ-rose, a counterpoint, by proximity and expectation, to the sacred center. Schild’s sounds and space are seen to play to the altar in the same way that Shivalingappa’s dance seems to address it. Making “sense” coheres Schild’s percussion seem into a music that accompanies, even leads, the transformative movement of the “sacred space” of the “altar”. All performers, however much expectation harnesses their sense to the center, remain virtuoso, each with its own center, its own sense.
A remarkable performance.
Shantala Shivalingappa, trained in contemporary European dance, working with masters such as Maurice Béjart, but early took to interpreting the classical Kuchipudi tradition of Hindu drama-dance, common to southern India. Loïc Schild trained in France in classical and jazz music and in India in the use of the madalam, a drum used in theater and dance production. He frequently plays on stage with dance as well as musical performers. Aurélien Bory, founder of the Cie 111 dance performance troupe, has spent nearly 20 years developing, directing, scenarizing and choreographing a special brand of “physical theater”, a unique mixing of theater, dance, circus, music and other visuals arts for live performance. La Scala – Paris, 13 boulevard de Strasbourg, 75010 Paris.
Performance calendar “Ash”, Cie 111.
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