My Other Country

You stand there and I throw this ball at you as hard as I can. The two of you run face first into the mattress until you crash and no don’t block your face with your hands. Talk as fast as you can in Italian. Pull the balloons over your body like a dress. Swing the metal ball and smash the plates. Don't think just do. Don’t be too active. Don't resist. Keep going until I stay stop. We are not looking at you we are looking at the material.

The material is 50 black balloons, rubber pebbles, stacks of wooden pallets, old gym equipment, rolls of plastic tape, a javelin, an Olympic hammer and the material is us. Nine dancers making a new piece with a two meters tall mustachioed Slovakian choreographer trained in fighting and martial arts. He shouts directions from the front of the room. When he’s not laughing, that is. Mouth wide open, he’s checking to make sure we’re paying attention, grinning You know what will be great? with a long rolling R. His English is a mixture of command, conjecture and critique from which the present continuous tense has been eliminated. Have a look. Try. Bravo. Do until I say stop. That’s from a different opera. Let’s say the floor starts to smoke. You can’t get hurt. Stop philosophizing, just do. You were the best and now it looks like shit. Let's say you are a gangster, let's say you are a god. Here, have a look. We work on it. I don’t hurt you.

We spend weeks searching for material. Movement material, for starters. A sequence of judo grips and kicks morphed into danced duets. Twenty versions of swinging the arms on the beat. A way to punch the air and stomp the floor simultaneously. And we use actual materials –tape, rubber pieces, all of it – to create images, scenes, scenarios. The gravity-defying balloons are tugged down from above, a dancer’s hands are taped to the metal bar where she dangles, men throw the rubber pieces and let them shower down like rain. If you find the right material you don’t have to break yourself for the image to speak says the giant. He wants to smash the iron lid of the wooden box with the hammer, wants a dancer to crawl out of the mattress that’s been smacked over and over with another dancer’s body, wants to flood the stage with mud that seeps from a pile of wood. The material should speak and that includes the body, so we hit and punch and kick and tumble and crash. But the body breaks down more easily than most material. Synapse. Sensation. Pleasure. Pain.

A dancer gets hit in the head with a medicine ball thrown full force. Another’s foot is webbed with blood after stepping on broken china. MRI results from the shoulder of a third show that it’s not as serious as they’d thought - the ligaments aren’t torn. But after a bad fall she was out for a week, icing her shoulder, sitting on the side. What I do now? The choreographer asked. There is no time to find new material. Meaning the movement. Meaning the images. Meaning the dancer.

What all materials share is the element of time. The time it takes to break the material down, to break it open, to make it speak. And the time it takes for the material to heal. The injured dancer sits on the side of the studio at the feet of the choreographer watching him direct a scene where three male dancers throw rubber pieces into the air, then arch their backs and fall to the floor as the pieces rain down. An oblation. An ablution. A female dancer stands behind them. Over and over they toss and fall, scoop and release. Finally they begin to paw through the material quickly, tossing it horizontally toward the woman. The choreographer has placed her there. As the men improvise crawling and sliding through the rubber while flicking it in her direction, he shouts directions until the scene is finished. Faster! To her! To her! More!

The injured dancer shifts the ice on her shoulder as the music fades and the dancers rest in the pile. The choreographer approaches the pile, picks up a handful of rubber, lets it fall. He flicks a small amount toward the female dancer. Have a look, he says to the men. You have to be delicate with the material. Meaning the rubber. Meaning the woman.

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for more on the choreography of J Frucek and E Kapetanea click here