★☆☆☆☆
Dance Reflections, a two-week festival presented by the jeweller Van Cleef & Arpels in partnership with three key London cultural institutions, has brought us several gems. But there have been a couple of big duds — first Christian Rizzo’s overblown, desultory une maison and now this bolder, more spectacularly egregious performance from the Franco-Austrian choreographer Gisèle Vienne.
Vienne’s large, loud, Olivier-nominated ensemble work Crowd, seen in London during the 2019 edition of Dance Umbrella, drew on its creator’s experiences of the club scene in Berlin. Here she appears to be sourcing from a store of dark fantasy scarred by nihilistic sexual politics.
Dating from 2010, This Is How You Will Disappear is in many ways much more of a sketchily theatricalised art installation than a dance piece. Vienne designed the impressive set: a fairly dense, naturalistic forest with a leaf-strewn floor. Sometimes a chill, damp fog rolls in and spills out into the auditorium. Lit ominously and radiantly by Patrick Riou and accompanied by frequently blaring music by Stephen O’Malley and Peter Rehberg that shifts between rock concert and cinema score, the sensory surface effect is striking.
But there is something rotten in these weird woods that essentially takes human form. Vienne gives us three characters, played by performers who collaborated on this version of the work: a girlish gymnast (Núria Guiu Sagarra), her brute coach (Jonathan Capdevielle) and a pathetic, goth-clad fellow identified in the programme as a rock star (Jonathan Schatz). Punctuated by brief but torturous monologues (text by Dennis Cooper), the thin, unsavoury and somnambulistic drama they play out is more enervating than disturbing.
Vienne may be trying to conjure the atmosphere of a mythical bad dream while delivering an oblique critique of toxic masculinity, including with heavy-breathing and flatulent noises on the soundtrack. But the effect is laboured and unilluminating, at times it’s as if she has swallowed too many horror films and this is the regurgitated result. The production’s only truly authentic note is the late cameo appearance of a pair of British lupine dogs that seem to have been exploited for their wild beauty.
The festival continues to March 23, dancereflections-vancleefarpels.com
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