Live arts correspondent Bella Todd on the hottest happenings in the global cultural calendar this week, including dancing dogs and aquariums at the Vienna International Dance Festival and a theatre company who risk prison every time they perform.
The Main Event: ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival
Vienna may be better known as a capital of classical music. But it’s also become one of the largest contemporary dance platforms in Europe thanks to ImPulsTanz. With over 100 performances in five weeks, this Viennese festival is very much about tearing up the rulebook rather than paying reverent homage to tradition. Between now and August 14 you can see dance in an aquarium, dance incorporating Twitter and Facebook, and dance inspired by the native Mexican’s answer to LSD. All that and dance with a live dog – which may be a fairly familiar site on YouTube and Britain’s Got Talent, but is still, as far as the world of contemporary dance is concerned, pretty barking.
Two of the biggest attractions in the 2011 programme will be works by Belgian choreographer Wim Vandekeybus and Canadian Marie Chouinard (pictured above) both of whom featured in the very first ImPulsTanz back in 1988. Director, choreographer, actor and photographer Vandekeybus is your aquarium man (watch a trailer here). Both a former psychology student and the son of a vet, he’s always been fascinated by the relationship between the body, the spirit and our primitive animal instincts. So it’s fitting his new piece of film-dance, which includes a naked performer in a tank of water, is called Monkey Sandwich (the literal translation of the Dutch phrase ‘broodje aap’, meaning urban legend). Meanwhile Chouinard is returning to the stage for the first time in two decades with her radiant solo piece Gloires Du Matin, named after the sky-blue flower whose seeds were used in magic rituals by Mexican natives on account of their hallucinatory effect.
Other hot tickets are Chris Haring and Liquid Loft’s Talking Head (watch a trailer here), which builds on the choreographer’s fascination with science fiction films and uses webcam to explore our self-exposure through social media; and New Work, the latest from Édouard Lock and his Canadian group La La La Human Steps (pictured below), which unites the tragic love stories of Dido and Aeneas and Orpheus and Eurydice in a breakneck dance of death and desire scored by Brit Gavin Bryars (watch an extract here).
But if there’s going to be one all-out star of this festival we’re putting our money on the dog. The show in question, Bulgarian performance artist Ivo Dimchev’s We.art.dog.come, opens with said canine and goes on to present a wildly surreal exploration of nature and culture. It’s been described as ‘a ticket for a haunted house where Monty Python, Jérôme Bel and David Lynch live together’… and co-own a Jack Russell, natch.
Best of the Rest
- The Belarus Free Theatre has more than earned its right to the title of ‘bravest theatre in the world’, and no one had to eat a dead baby (see Sarah Kane’s Blasted), blaspheme against Shakespeare or work with Marlon Brando in the process. Simply put, the members of this underground company risk arrest and torture every time they perform in their home country. This week they’re on safer ground at London’s Almeida with Eurepica. Challenge, a collection of 12 plays from 11 European countries.
- There are good reasons why Spain’s Monegros music festival takes place in the desert, and one of them surely has to do with the sound pollution laws that would otherwise be broken by the massing of 40,000 people around five stages simultaneously pumping out techno, electro, hip-hop, drum'n'bass and dubstep for 22 consecutive hours. It’s the big fat cacti-crowned rave of the summer.
- A ‘comedy prom’ hosted by piano-playing comedian Tim Minchin, a concert dedicated to movie music including the Harry Potter and Star Wars films and a free family event based on CBBC’s surprise cult classic Horrible Histories are all part of the 117th BBC Proms, which are now under way with 90 concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall and Cadogan Hall until 10 September.
Want more?
Comments
Add a comment