Since the modern dance-emergence has been associated with its period of colonialism. In the 1930s, made, for example, the Swedish ballet of Rolf de Maré Josephine Baker to star at Paris. Her banandanser was an example of how the dance was for the exotic, but also, through its artistically challenging choreographies, went beyond such an image. This painful duality in the modern history of dance is a legacy and a challenge that today’s choreographers are never going away and that they, therefore, must relate to time and time again.
In the belgian dansteaterkompaniet Les Ballets C de la B’s latest production, both made and not made this. As de Maré, is the company’s artistic director Alain Platel genuinely interested in other expressions than those he himself is schooled in. A pity, then, that it is still so bad. In ”Requiem pour L ‘ seems the desire to have been to renew Mozart’s famous requiem as well as to highlight the mundane in western grief.
the company’s previous works. Artistic elements and expressions are put next to each other as in a collage. At the back against the giant wall, a macabre film of a very sick woman in a bed. Blurry and without sound, as if we saw her through a webcam in her bedroom. In front of a gravstensmonument almost identical with the one in Berlin to the memory of the Holocaust, consisting of black boulders.
The long work serves as a concert performed by the fourteen incredibly talented musicians. Fabrizio Cassol has composed a new version of Mozart’s requiem, which takes the form of a ”call and response”. Three opera singers singing Mozart and answer of three other singers who sing on – what in my uneducated ears sounds like – different african languages. The music has influences of jazz, congolese xylofonmelodier and cuban music. On including drums, tvåhalsade electric guitars and mbiras accompanies the other musicians. Occasionally moving, softly with hips, stampandes, often personal and impromptu.
The most boring with this work is that Mozart’s requiem is never challenged. Instead kept the classical music on their page, and the ”other” music, which here may stand for everything else except Mozart, at his. If the idea has been to want to dissolve the boundaries between these so do the just the opposite. The only thing I see is two white belgian artists ‘ fascination for the exotic virtuosity. Conveniently preserving all the ingrained ideas about both music and death. Perhaps that is why the fully packed audience absolutely love this work.
are the musicians and the dancers. Their capacity goes, as well as Josephine Baker’s dance did, beyond the Platels and Cassols unilateral dream of multiculturalism where Mozart rekviem still form the center.