Flanders doesn´t see Folkwang wanting
Highly praised FTS performance
WAZ, July 3, 2001
Michael Kohlstadt
„Lakenhal” is not an account of Flemish history. Instead Henrietta Horn adopts a lyrical, narrative tone and sets out on a poetic journey through the emotional terrain of a small, self-confident, joyful but also enslaved and war stained nation. Henrietta Horn brings together her images with arresting certainty and a moving and evocative sense of urgency to create a dance work of tremendous intensity. Amidst white lengths of cloth hanging from the ceiling, the dancers move in flowing, harmonious movements. It´s all a bit more supple and lithe than Horn´s other works. Excellent too is the selection of music, tinged with melancholia that ranges from Jaques Brel to Digeridoo, from Chanson to world music.
ballett international, tanz aktuell 7/2001
Bettina Trouwborst
One could take it for one of Henrietta Horn’s striking word compositions: Unlike „Dankhang” or „Gewege”, however, the title of her latest piece, „Lakenhal”, can be found in a dictionary - a Flemish one. It means „cloth hall” - at the height of its prosperity, Flanders was famous for its linen -, and that is what the stage, draped in lengths of pale cloth, suggests. In this setting, Henrietta Horn and the Folkwang Dance Studio (FTS) sketch a vague portrait of Flanders, that region in northern Belgium which, forever at the mercy of the powerful, kept changing its nationality over the centuries. The director of the FTS uses a commission by the department of culture of Bayer Leverkusen to show up mechanisms of power, suppression and rebellion. She does it wonderfully by means of clearly structured, elegant steps and - for the first time - ironical, funny images and associations which expose the powerful as frauds.
Where is Flanders?
Henrietta Horn’s new choreography „Lakenhal” in Leverkusen
Tanzdrama 4/2001
Gesa Pölert
Horn translates her studies of the fate of Flanders into abstract images, associative scenes. She makes movements and looks speak volumes, stages confrontations, rebellious rage and joyful abandon as the panorama of a chequered history based only loosely on the actual history and narrative tradition.
Making the best of things, letting oneself be governed, rising up or just minding one’s own business far away from the state and the laws, these are the human and historical moments she juxtaposes. When a blustering statesman waves his hands around grandly at the beginning, trying to realize his fantasies of omnipotence, the others hide behind the cloth sets, daring to show themselves only in the dark. Until one dancer faces up to him without batting an eyelid, unimpressed by his threatening gestures: An act of courage, of rebellion. A kind of peasant dance in great striding steps, the upper part of the body leaning backwards - one is reminded of the disrespectful paintings of the old Flemish masters - turns into a joint celebration of freedom.
These are quite different from the scene in which the whole company moves like puppets on a string, or the military manoeuvre at the end: Set to an old lansquenet song, it evokes the times when Flanders’s men died as mercenaries in foreign wars.