This solo by the athlete turned dancer Pierre Rigal is one of several French imports in the 2006 London International Mime Festival. His performance is admirably physical, although not in the explicit sense that you expect from the cheeky title. Rather than a paean to a column of flesh, the evening turns out to be a piece of wordless visual theatre about the evolution of Man. And quite compelling it is, too.
Rigal conceived Erection with the director and designer Aurélien Bory, whose Compagnie 111 opened the festival with a playful conceptualist entertainment called More or Less Infinity. Like Bory’s own productions, he and Rigal explore a core idea through a pronounced corporeality and a simple yet sophisticated use of technology. Rigal is first seen lying flat on his back in bands of black and white. His chest repeatedly juts upwards as if of its own accord. Surprised and possibly disconcerted, he rolls on to his side, then his stomach, squirming like a worm before flipping on to his back. He stretches, pumping his limbs. He tries to stand, although initially his muscles won’t support him.
Rigal is like a newborn adult struggling to figure out how his body works, but committed to the rigour of his tasks. Alert and remarkably lithe, he can move fast. He pivots, head over heels, on his shoulders; squats, hands on knees; and runs in circles on all fours. The precision and clarity of his actions imprint on the eye and the mind. The entire performance is staged in the light produced by video projections. This, and a sometimes over loud soundtrack that veers between ambient sound and instrumental art-rock, means that it will appeal to young techno-heads with a theatrical bent. But it also works on more mature, metaphorical levels.
You might regard Rigal as the continually destabilised occupant of an unpredictable, and yet mysteriously ordered, universe. Circumstances take a toll on him. Captured in a strobe light, just like the one American choreographer David Parsons uses in his famous gob-smacking solo Caught, Rigal appears to fly. Levitation in Parsons’s dance is exhilarating. Rigal, on the other hand, is like a live and electrified version of Edvard Munch’s screamer — full of clammy terror.
Lasting just under an hour, the performance comes full circle with Rigal on the floor again in a state of peaceful suspension. His sober, abstract show could be viewed as an intriguing charting of the human journey from birth to death.
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