Pulsating urban rhythms and dancers primed to evocative corporeal expression are a feature of Momentum , a performance from the Bonn-based dance ensemble CocoonDance, currently on a three-city tour of India supported by Pro Helvetia India.
Directed by the Swiss-born choreographer Rafaële Giovanola, the piece premiered in 2016 at the Theater im Ballsaal. It’s a venue that is repurposed from an erstwhile mid-century ballroom, that CocoonDance helps manage as one of Bonn’s few free experimental performing arts spaces.
Metamorphosis
The shadows and alleys of inner-city neighbourhoods are immediately brought to mind in Momentum , purely through its three intrepid performers’ spatial negotiation of the turf of performance. The light design is minimal but effective, conjuring up moody urbanscapes out of veritable thin air. The dancers start off flat on their stomachs, as if dead to the world, but almost glacially wiggle their way to a terminal velocity of sorts, like creeping insects steadily moulting into incandescent fireflies. At Delhi’s Oddbird Theatre, which is fast emerging as the go-to space for the cutting-edge ventures, Momentum was performed on Wednesday as part of OddLab, a new initiative that endeavours to support experimental and unconventional works, whether homegrown or international. A multicultural audience of almost a hundred were strewn ‘along the curtains and the walls,’ providing ample stomping ground to the performers (Alvaro Esteban Lopez, Andras Deri and Werner Nigg), as they moved seamlessly from one set-piece to another, each one more invigorating than the last.
Masked for a large part of the performance, which clocks in at a short but impactful 50 minutes, the dancers are at first akin to night-crawling vigilantes or petty criminals who occupy the underbelly much more comfortably than most.
At one point, the floor becomes the vast vertical spread of a wall that they intrepidly climb. The percussive score, slowly building up to a crescendo, feeds them tiny morsels of kinetic propulsion. Sometimes they are caught up in the swirl of the unforgiving city commute. At other times they are parkour enthusiasts not easily encumbered by architectural hurdles. It comes to a head in a sprawling urban dance hall, and the performers, now unmasked, dissolve into a mesh of writhing bodies, a world in which those watching seem to have become strangely participative.
Familiar ironies
Momentum is much more vicarious than most dance pieces because the performers occupy a world that is almost entirely familiar to city-dwellers, even if most of us do not inhabit our respective habitats in such an immediate or tangible manner. The labour of nameless urban bodies outside in the open are juxtaposed with the cushy night-life urban pursuits of those whose no longer need the crutches of anonymity. The dance club becomes an urban citadel into which we are all allowed entry even if no one actually breaches the invisible line between performer and audience. Yet, the masked denizens of the night, sweaty and restless, heaving and breathing, remain just out of reach and occasionally out of breath, even if the sheer sensuality of their lives, now re-imagined via Giovanola’s inventive dance score, marks them out as tantalising specimens of an essential humanity. The mask, perhaps the only accoutrement afforded to the performers apart from their clothes, is an important metaphor that speaks of a city’s unsettling dichotomies, the ‘us and them’ that is all the more ironic at urban spaces like Oddbird.
In Mumbai, CocoonDance have also conducted a workshop prior to the performance of Momentum , scheduled for this evening. In the workshop, the group “builds on the idea of generating energy by working with pulsations. This energy then becomes the starting point to initiate a fresh choreographic composition.” This is, in essence, the framework in which Momentum operates, even as the show’s untiring dancers conspire to take it places that are much beyond that initial impetus.
Momentum by CocoonDance will take place this evening at 8.30 p.m. at G5A, Foundation for Contemporary Culture; see bookmyshow.com
