By BRUCE DENNILL
e.ID: A Fugue / Directed by Louise Coetzer / Drama Theatre, State Theatre, Pretoria
Cape Town dance company Darkroom Contemporary Dance Theatre is known for its experimental, interdisciplinary productions. Here, around a conceptual core built on concerns and observations about the unavoidable enmeshing of our identities with the digital world we all spend much of modern existence in, the idea of a fugue is woven into all aspects of the production, from the choreography to the lighting and, notably, the score.
In music, a fugue is a form of composition in which melodies are interwoven and developed in counterpoint – complex from both a writing and performance point of view. And psychologically, a fugue involves a loss of identity and unplanned movement. As a combination, these ideas make for a fractured, arrhythmic aural and visual narrative that both unsettles and thrills.
Athletically, the performances are astounding. The five-dancer company – Gemma Trehearn, Tamsyn Pretorius, Rian Jansen, Gala Winkler and Aphiwe Sodlamba – completes the equivalent of a rugby test match in terms of the strength and stamina required for a 75-minute, no-interval peace broken only very briefly between scenes under titles that reflect continues themes like water, breath and immersion: “Out of water”, “Amnion”, “Undertow” and more.
The music, created by a team including Inge Beckmann, Njabulo Phungula, Heidrun Schramm and Nicolas Wiese under the musical direction of Brydon Bolton, is brooding and irregular, even sinister at times. Indeed, calling it “music” at all feels somewhat misleading – it’s a soundtrack to the energy and tension of the piece, not a guideline to cadence and phrasing as more conventional dance and choreography is performed to.
Accordingly, the choreography by Louise Coetzer, who also directs, is not smooth and flowing, or even – to those expecting some sort of traditional explanation of story through movement – narrative in the way it plays out. In ensemble segments, the dancers often build the passages through using the same assortment of movements, but not at the same time, until two or more suddenly do overlap and the tight, staccato control temporarily becomes smooth and synchronised. With everyone speaking a shared choreographic language, where the actions of human bodies echo the angular, choppy processing of machines, these moments feel like briefly singing in harmony instead of trying to speak across each other, and there is a concurrent shift in mood as that happens.
The stage design and props – bands of light, huge fans, bags of water that are carried and balanced and moved around, a large plastic batch – and the dancers’ extraordinary manipulation of their bodies means there are a number of stark, striking poses that sear themselves into the audience’s consciousness before being replaced by something fresh and new. This always happens quickly, too, as the company somehow seem to recover and reposition themselves at the end of each passage without any fuss or discernible fatigue.
In all, the piece is likely to leave different audience members processing everything from the sophisticated concept, the aural onslaught to the complete commitment of the company (with Trehearn perhaps the standout of an exceptional group) to a huge, exhausting task in different ways. But it’s impossible to leave the theatre anything less than impressed – perhaps stunned – and with the work touring to Berlin and then Arnhem in the Netherlands after the Pretoria run, its reach and impact will be widely felt.