Dance in Berlin: flitting between shadows and light
The other night I treated myself to some of the art on offer in Berlin at a venue down the street called Dock 11. The piece was called Andropolaroid and came recommended as a Tagestip by Zitty. An intriguing enough name, it was a solo dancer piece performed by a sprightly Japanese dancer Yui Kawaguchi, who I gather from the program is also of German extraction. If ever an ethnicity demanded an exploration of man and machine, this was it.
Of course the theater was inside a huge warehouse space with exposed bricks walls and high ceilings. But the show was such a beguiling piece of motion and light that at times I was transported out of the warehouse and into some other more intimate space. The piece was as memorable for the startling light installation that inhabited the stage as for the show itself. About a hundred programmable flourescent tubes dangled from the ceiling carving out a geometric pattern that criss-crossed the room. The show proceeded through a complex set of lighting design, varying in its luminal intensity, from fast and kinetic, to subtle, diffuse and slow. We were sometimes dropped from darkness onto a lonely spot on the stage. Other times the entire array of lights would crackle into a warm glow. It felt like space and time mutating in front of our very eyes.
Although strictly speaking there was only one woman on the stage, the lights effectively served as a second dancer as Kawaguchi rippled through bodies of light and shadow. The style was a disciplined flow of modern dance, some servicable pop-and-locking and some welcome dollops of circus-like theatrics, involving some imaginative manipulation of the swinging lights. A particular effective sequence involved an affecting red hoodie, the burst of color popping out of an otherwise monochromic stage.
Holding it together was the gorgeous sound design delivered through 10 huge speakers hung around the ceiling in the room. Although most of the music revolved around rythmic industrial minimalist beats (we are in Berlin after all), there were some theatrical touches, including an eerie effect where Kawaguchi would lipsync to an amplified whispering. The thought behind how the sound was projected around the room was precisely accentuated to the action on stage. And it is fitting that the final scene faded into the cello strains of a plaintive track by Colleen.
