Dancing on the Volcano
The Folkwang Tanzstudio presents two premieres at once.
NRZ Essen, Dagmar Schenk-Güllich, 06.03.2009
The Folkwang Academy's Neue Aula saw two premieres at once when the famous Folkwang Tanzstudio presented two new pieces to the public, created by two young dancers and choreographers, Tokyo-born Chikako Kaido and the Argentinian Leo Kees.
It was the first choreography for the Tanzstudio for both of them, though their messages and styles of expression vary wildly. Leo Kees' work is multimedia-based, he loves to play with formalistic possibilities. „Writing on Water”, a piece that explores the ephemeral quality of movement, features dialogues between dance and video in which the videocamera montage reveals his great joy of experimentation and sure sense of composition. The solos, duos or group scenes are powerful and dynamic, anything but cerebral and subtle. The free play of forms determines what happens on the dance floor.
All this is quite unlike Chikako Kaido's piece. The dancer studied classical ballet and the philosophy of Bhuto before she enrolled at the Folkwang Academy. A workshop with Henrietta Horn, the former director of the Folkwang Tanzstudio, inspired the young Japanese to focus on modern expressionist dance. These multicultural roots show in her work „There Is an Abyss”, too.
No less persistent than Horn, she sticks to patterns of movement that reveal how little human beings are at home in the world or in their own bodies. It was in Japan, a land with a frighteningly high suicide rate, that she had the initial idea to represent the visible as well as the invisible characteristics of the broken human being. One sees a battered man laugh, a group collapse with tottering limbs, sees breakdowns and brawls that are suggested rather than executed.
Nervousness, destruction, aggression, constriction, violence between men and women, in the crowd or against themselves, are the subjects of her work. Kaido's body language is exciting and eccentric, incisive, fast and distinctive, though the piece does have its lengths. A short, humorous – but no less eerie – musical intermezzo in the otherwise silent work in which two dancers take symbolic aim at the audience interrupts this evening of self-flagellation. The audience were thrilled.