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“Aesthetic perfection”

“Bits and Pieces”: Rodolpho Leoni shows first performance of his new piece in Neue Aula

WAZ Kultur, Essen, 21.12.2009
Sarah Heppekausen

There was a lot going on this weekend as far as dance technique is concerned: while his students presented their work for the third time at PACT Zollverein on Saturday, Folkwang Professor Rodolpho Leoni unveiled the premiere of his own new piece in the Neue Aula. He called his seventy-minute work “Bits and Pieces”. And the twelve dancers occupied the space like mass data colonising a memory stick. In solos, duets and group formations they moved with the same rhythmic precision and almost technoid style as the predominantly electronic soundtrack – from David Behrmann to Terry Riley’s Minimal Music.

Leoni, artistic director of the Folkwang Dance Studio, displays physical abstractions again and again in his choreographic works. This time too his dancers were not emotionally torn beings laying bare their innermost souls in the dance. Their solos were like pieces in an exhibition, the group formations like atmospheric communications systems. Sergey Zhukov presented the first solo as a powerful disco prelude number with break-dance inserts. His gaze was directed again and again towards the audience as if he wanted to assure himself that his dance art was being perceived as such. Leoni’s dancers presented the language of modern – and sometimes also classical – dance vocabulary as a formal act, with aesthetic perfection, in blue-green trousers and shirts, on an effectively lit but otherwise bare stage. Sometimes we fancied we recognised a fight, sometimes pieces in a game dancing as though on a scratched turntable.

Only at the end did Leoni unfortunately soften his otherwise so consistently fast-paced evening. The music changed abruptly to the Brazilian singer-songwriter Marcelo Camelo, and the dancers changed from formal movement to emotional and inwardly directed movement.

„Strident and jazzy“

“Bits and Pieces” celebrates premiere in the Folkwang Tanzstudio. Choreography doesn’t allow any pausing for breath.

WAZ/NRZ, 04.01.2010
Beatrix Stan

… In “Bits and Pieces” Leoni turned the pace of immensely dynamic, in-your-face performance up another notch. A strident, jazz-like music of the spheres accentuated the first soloist, whose body lost itself again and again in changes of direction, writhed like a snake, halted in mid-movement, shifted, seemed to be fighting against his own hands. The shocking thing, and also in the other solos that were given to each of the dancers who were already familiar from the first part of the evening, was in the permanence of the changes of direction. No act had any length, none could be brought to an end. On Leoni’s stage there is no space for relief. And there was no group finale at the end as many of the audience expected.

The core of the choreography was far more a combat piece embedded in the centre of the piece, which the male Folkwang cast dashed off with brilliant vehemence. To the sound of deafening hammering and the noise of an aeroplane landing, the quintet was drenched in a blue and white spotlight. Gestures of self-display, self-positioning and fist-clenching dominated in dance combat. There was kicking and punching on all sides, gestures of submission were demanded and sometimes given where they didn’t seem to lead to flight.  This was followed by another attack, a further affront as a symbol of the brave new world of the alpha male as has become common practice in the global economic space.

A partner dance that followed it also reflected this desolation in a nutshell. Hunting and battering, then as soon as they came closer to each other there came the punishing attack, where one nailed the other to the floor with the weight of his own body. Thus the courtship turned into a deeply black combat-dance for two dancers. “Bits” turned out to be pieces that linked seamlessly to “Shifting Concentration”, Ways were blocked and bodies pushed off, pushed away, veered around with them. A single victor emerged from a three-person struggle; remaining alone on the stage, he seemed in the end to be still fighting himself.

The final piece was gently forgiving, a solo fantasy to soft piano chords and a song sung by a human voice that invoked the Eros of the dance for the first time this evening. Four “curtains” for the valiant troupe, who – in an absolutely minimalist way, without any props or set or particular costumes, and in many passages even without music – had let their bodies express what afflicts the soul of the modern human being. As if he could survive alone as soon as he stands on his own feet.