Distracted by 18 Musicians: Keersmaeker's Rain at Sadler's Wells
Rain
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas and Ictus Ensemble
Sadler's Wells
Second Circle C24, £20
13 June 2017
Sadler's Wells page
Rain is a beautiful response to a wonderful piece of music. This is the received opinion and essentially I agree with it. As it happened, this performance didn't set my heart racing in the way I would expect of something meeting that description. The main reason I think this was is a pretty standard risk of seeing dance created to music you already like, but not one that I've found this distracting before.
I find a valuable hypnotism in Reich's Music for 18 Musicians; I couldn't call it zen because it's too exciting but it gives me a sense of implacable hugeness that nothing else really replicates. Rain suggests to me that Keersmaeker hears very different things. This is cool, and to be honest to be expected given my choreographic instinct (which if you've seen me on the dance floor you'll know is stunted, to say the least). I usually find that tension almost exclusively interesting, but here I felt an obnoxiously distracting regret for my disrupted feelings of implacable hugeness.
So what does Keersmaeker hear (or rather what do I think Keersmaeker hears)? To me the piece is entirely abstract (you know, implacable) but Keersmaeker pulls out narrative fragments – illicit love, different-drummer individuality, jealousy – though as I say only fragments, glimpsed fleetingly before they dissolve into the fabric of near-continual, enchanting movement, linked by tactile chains. She constructs patterns and motifs the shapes of which seem to be inspired by the music rather than directly relating to it. She extends the dance beyond the end of the music, perhaps to show us how much the same movement changes when it is performed in silence.
The dancers, as almost always seems to be the case nowadays, are extraordinary: seemingly tireless, seemingly superhuman in both physical and mnemonic power. The set design, of a curved wall of weighted ropes, is used such that it is essential to the nature of the dance. The costumes are more extraneous, although with their transformation from beige to pink and back to transformed beige perhaps the only element that comes close to visualizing the music's most obvious shape. The migraine-inflicting flashing lights I could have done without.
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