New texts on dance: "manoeuvre_"

“manoeuvre_” resists easy categorization and invites multiple interpretive approaches. In a sparse scenic environment – the floor covered in clear plastic sheeting, lighting flickering slightly, all accompanied by a soundscape – a choreographic action unfolds that incorporates an unusual material: a plank of wood.

This co-existence poses many questions concerning the role of the object, which has a dominating presence throughout the performance. The supple material that is the dancers’ bodies and the rigid material that is the wood co-star in this piece. The choreography is developed by means of linear paths taken through the space, while the plank delineates the action along certain axes – the vertical, the horizontal, and the diagonal. The dancers always move in relation to the plank of wood, adjusting their movements in reaction to its surface, geometry, and weight. Their actions create a symmetry that is reflected in the plastic and on the walls to produce patterns. Audiences watch a series of movements, the changes in which give different significations each time to the plank of wood.

The performers introduce us to an everyday object, presenting it to audiences, becoming one with it, trying to enter into conversation with its various potentialities. The ergonomics of their movements, combined with the sparse aspect of the stage, maintain a monotonous level of emotion in those watching that holds sway from the beginning of the performance to its end. One does wonder, however, to what degree “manoeuvre_” overturns the ways in which the language of dance is codified within multiple utilizations of an object.

The audience enters the space. Two female dancers are lying on the floor facing upwards, tuck in with a wooden plank. Their eyes are closed and they look like sleeping. They wait, under the weight of the plank, for the audience to sit, while I am pondering, is it heavy? Can they breathe?

The two dancers are slowly moving with the plank, as if they are one body. After a while, the plank becomes a transformable object. A well performed and well directed counterbalance game begins among the three. The dancers’ vivid efforts to find balance contradict the stagnancy of the lifeless plank.

During the piece, the wooden plank takes different forms. It resembles a grave with hands rising from its sides, and a guillotine with heads and arms falling over. Other times it reminds us of a seesaw, a slide, a swing or a hobbyhorse. Is it a toy? The dancers move in a clear, prescribed way on stage. They pause when they conquer the desired balance. They continue to skilfully manipulate the plank as a climbing wall, a ladder, a lifting machine. Is it a tool?

The choreographic work is a case study of how an object is used on stage in relation to acts of balancing performed by the dancers. The dancers’ labor is based on their collaboration in endless efforts to achieve balance between them and the plank, and in essence to create a common ground.

The usage and transformation of the plank become a fertile ground to conceive the stage as a construction area between object and kinetic creativity, life and lifelessness, joy and stillness. As a spectator, I found myself experiencing a playground for grown-ups, constantly expecting an instant and simultaneously fragile equilibrium.

In the beginning of “manoeuvre_”, Candy Karra and Chara Kotsali are lying on the ground, joined on the same line, while a wooden plank balances on top of their bodies. The spare and abstract setting is accompanied by stillness and silence. With poker faces, the dancers manipulate the plank by carrying, balancing, dragging and hiding behind it. They slide from the top of the plank all the way down, or they use the object to tediously balance their hands with a slight extension of the wrist.

This playful inventiveness that emerges through the body-object relation keeps us curious about what they will do next. After all, everything stays in a state of lasting instability, as the effort to balance the plank on the wall continues to fail. Throughout “manoeuvre_”, the dual interaction between living body and rigid material remains the active point of interest, putting into question the distinction between “subject” and “object”.

Have you ever been felled by a flatpack? Lying corpsed beneath a plank of wood, almost as if it were a coffin lid, Candy Karra and Chara Kotsali appear to have been there, and done that.

The remainder of this sparse piece – for two bodies, one plank and the occasional thud or crackle of sound – plays out almost like a replay of the moves that might have brought them to this impassive juncture. With faces either hidden or determinedly blank, Karra and Kotsali variously slide, place, carry and rotate the plank.

The work pivots on an understated ambiguity. On one side, the women – arms folding, hands gripping, spines leaning, feet anchoring – are parts of a material, mechanical world. On the other, the plank comes closer to a human world in which the women, in their studiously neutral way, variously try it out as seesaw, lever, compass or climbing frame.

Mostly, you watch the moves without being moved by them, but there are glimpses of more poetic significance. Using the plank as a ladder to reach upwards, for example, as if towards some higher purpose. Or the closing scene, the plank repeatedly toppling only for the women to set it upright again – counterbalancing the work’s static, deadpan opening with a Sisyphean image of life, continuing.