Originally laid out to impose rational charm on what I get the impression was a rather higgledy-piggledy daily reality, there is a lot to be said for 18th-century provincial cities such as Nancy. That rational charm remains hard at work in our topsy-turvy 21st century. From the (tidy, practical) rail station to the picture-postcard place Stanislaus, the French take on “appreciate” comes to mind: the eye weighs without judgement, our sensibility pleased but not teased by well-kept and commodious Art-Nouveau buildings added into, around and within the softened but well-ordered lines and stylized gorgon-medallions of the little city’s Age-of-Reason-style baroque.
Inside and out, Nancy’s opera house, on the place Stanislaus, the destination of my walk and where I was to see Petter Jacobson and Thomas Caley’s brand new Air Condition dance performance for the Ballet de Lorraine, recalls this same rational charm. Reconstructed with the new materials and methods developed and used by Art Nouveau and with its place in the urban environment as esthetic baseline, the turns on spectator experience and performance needs seriously: it calls attention to itself only as its design, space and decoration lend themselves to experience and need. Nice place, Nancy!
In the mix of wider cultural themes – the Baroque, Art Nouveau – it seems to me that Nancy enjoys a continuity of local intentions and perspectives that create the city’s present moment. Nancy is its own unique place. And without my being able to put my finger on exactly why, this sense of continuity needs the breaks and punctuations of the randomly preserved fractions of mine-worker housing and randomly-sited contemporary metal-plastic-glass-on-asphalt-in-grass residence-asteroids glimpsed from the train. Also the fashionable clothing in the shop windows, the people on the streets and cafés and the unexpected surge of people coming into the opera house to see the show. Maybe the continuity needs pointing so we can make sense of it as a “present moment”.
As I went in the door of the opera, got my tickets and looked around, I was actually thinking: Is continuity of intention a continuity of place and people shaping each other over time?; is “past” a pastiche of intention that consciousness automatically orders to keep me sane?; is past therefore a retroactive simulacrum of present?
By synchronicity, as I lounged in my seat and went over the program, I learned that “Ready Made”, the 2021-22 thematic for the Ballet de Lorraine’s four performances and Air condition, the first of the four, turn around “movement of the visualized world”. In other words, the pieces explore qualities such as “continuity”: “time”, “duration”, the “present”, “past” or “time” with bodies in movement.
Air Condition starts up Ready Made’s exploring of the time theme with a production based on Yves Klein’s 1954 unproduced ballet, La Guerre (de la ligne et de la couleur). Klein wanted La Guerre to materialize in bodies and movement the immateriality of his work on line and color. Which Jacobson’s does with aplomb.
Tomás Saraceno sets Klein’s concern in a peculiarly imperfect white-grey flicker of what might be a pre-1960s movie. The flicker is bisected by a black line that projects enough visual umph to make a spectator imagine “line of horizon” but recalls “separating” rather than actually separating or distancing anything. Saraceno’s setting is well-washed with a deliberated soundscape composed by Eliane Radigue. Like line of horizon, the composition has just enough music umphto determinedly lead up to some brilliant apotheosis without ever bumping triumphantly (tumbling disconsolately away from) into it.
Dressed in shades and facets of the set’s lights by Ballet de Lorraine costumer Birgit Neppl and her team, Air condition’s twenty-four bodies in movement eventually collide, provoking emotional shape and substance in the process.
With a body pressing into an elastic horizon as multi-point of reference, bodies suddenly spin into the air and disappear from the roiling movement up and down the stage. Once recovered from the first, unexpected, plunge into the void, I’m asking, Losing grip or willing to go? and editorializing, All that separates the living and the dead is time?
Meanwhile, the horizon transforms from line to space to surface, the set from black sun to white light setting – could be vice versa, too – from an inside to an outside.
As a meticulously conceived and executed choreography, Air condition is a great success.
But it owes its success as a performance to the individuals of the Ballet de Lorraine. That’s because Jacobson’s vision of how to perform turns on encouraging diversity, turning away the old idea of unity embodied in “one from many” toward a new type of unity: ‘many ones” in which performers in movement find each other again and again in the movement of each and then of all. The sense of the choreography articulates and projects itself through performer diversity – the expression of an individual’s quality as a body, a personality and a flow movement.
So I came away from Jacobsson’s Air condition as I came away from the Jacobsson’s Plaisirs inconnus: a bit stunned by the strength of feeling “many one” deploys.
The Sunday afternoon I saw Air condition, Petter Jacobsson was named to the Ordre des arts et lettres for his contributions to dance performance. Though the citation named many of the choreographer’s admirable qualities, doings and deeds, it didn’t mention achieving a “many ones” performance team among them. For my money, it should have been at the top of the list.
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