Surprising, exhilarating, and breathtakingly beautiful at every turn
Join, choreographed by Ioannis Mandafounis, sees the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company collaborate with dance students from the city each performance takes place in. Staged at Sadler’s Wells East as part of Van Cleef & Arpels’ Dance Reflections festival, the company here joins forces with the Rambert School, coming together at different stages of their personal and professional trajectories to create something astonishing.
The ensemble and students work at the cutting edge of the art form, world-leading in contemporary dance and often indistinguishable in terms of the meeting points of their careers. Where the company provides exacting standards for the next generation of London’s professional dancers, the students inject a playful, experimental lightness to their collaboration. Informally spread in front of the stage as the audience enters, we get a snapshot of their pre-performance movements, stretching and chatting quietly before they begin.
This is a production concerned with the edges of performance, stretching the boundaries of formal etiquette to disrupt rigorously upheld artistic norms and question where theatre ends and life begins. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America leans heavily into this kind of disruption, with stage directions emphasizing the theatricality of its depicted angels: ‘the wires show’, they insist. This notion of the wires showing is evident throughout Join, while simultaneously demonstrating a seamless professionalism and mastery of craft. The imposing black temple of the stage has its walls toppled, the curtains falling and crumpling to reveal a simple, real(istic) backstage setup; the black floor covering is slowly heaved off by the dancers to uncover a luminescent white underbelly; and an instantly unnerving moment is conjured by the house lights throwing the audience into sudden, vulnerable exposure, while the stage remains in looming darkness. Fourth wall breaks of the kind favoured by Fleabag and Punchdrunk, unsettling the lines between performer and audience, don’t come close to the ominous effectiveness of this technique.
Hand in hand with its imagining of new ways of performing, the dancers enact new ways of being and connecting with each other, in a kind of utopian dreaming. Themes of necessary playfulness and liberation underwrite each section: two young dancers with breath audibly flowing offer a new model of masculinity in their platonic, un-self-conscious exchange, falling and reaching towards and caring for each other. Two femme-presenting dancers bring children to mind in their equally carefree cavorting, immediately evoking years of friendship. It is testament to the hegemony of the strict codes that govern women’s conduct that they are most reminiscent of children in their uninhibited movements and relations – how joyful to see the possibilities that arise with the shaking of these protocols.
The spiritual, the animalistic and the essentially human blend in the hands of these extraordinarily talented groups, aided by a refrain of instant blackouts, shaping segments and undermining our initial perceptions. Surprising, exhilarating, and breathtakingly beautiful at every turn, be sure to follow the Rambert School’s students throughout their careers, and to catch Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company when you next have the chance.