New texts on dance: "Reverie"

Two women and two men dressed in black, and two creatures in shapeless masks in search of the unknown and in battle with their past, constantly questioned the distance between light and darkness. Lights in green and purple, often manipulated by the performers on stage, created a universe that provokes unconscious instincts and impulses, while the transformation of bodies into mythical creatures was trusted and encouraged. Balloons, masks and a plastic lawn – used at times as a costume and at times as a carpet – also contributed to the magic realism that the creators wanted to propose on stage, not necessarily to refer to a fantastic sphere, but mostly to doubt daily conformity.

However, is there a reverie or a daydream, without letting go? The dancers’ movement, light effects and stage objects were all perfectly defined, touching beauty but not the pulse of the dreamworld. What is a reverie, when we cannot dream beyond the theater?

Dream states hold a perennial appeal for artists. With their free associations, surreal or hyperreal imagery, narrative fragmentation, intense moods and mysterious meanings, they seem to touch upon a nerve of creativity itself.

Georgia Tegou and Michalis Theophanous’s "Reverie" doesn’t go that far. True, its imagery does come from deep dreaming. The four dancers – Arianna Ballastrieri, Fenia Chatzakou, Michael Incarbone and Kostas Papamatthaiakis – mutate into mythical beasts and hybrid creatures, one winding across the floor like a sea-serpent, others with helmet-like masks that crown their heads with whorls and tentacles. In a striking image (instantly recognisable from Xavier Le Roy’s 1998 "Self Unfinished"), one woman flips herself into a back-to-front, upside-down creature.

The performers also embody human figures, albeit surreal and archetypal: one woman picks up a lawn-like carpet and wraps it around her into a queenly robe; another clutches ghostly white balloons that seem to have replaced her head with empty thought-bubbles. And all the while, stage lamps are carried about so that the light, shade and colour keep shifting, unstably.

For all this, the effect is strangely skin-deep – more daydream than deep dream, a series of wandering thoughts and idle musings, too often accompanied by meandering music that washes the stage but – like the work itself – does not seep into the unconscious.

From the very first scene, the artists transport us into a waking dream that is not, however, crafted out of dreams. We follow the beam of a spotlight that leads us, perhaps, into the beginnings of some Don Quixote-like reveries; or perhaps to travel alongside Alice into a land no-one has ever visited, but that all of us have dreamed; or, in the end and without warning, into some horror scene.

Scenes change regularly, with differences seen both in the movement vocabularies of each, and in the number of dancers on stage (solos, duets, and ensemble sections). At times during the course of the performance, dancers appear wearing masks taken from teen horror films or with white balloons in place of their heads, without this bestowing some clear identity or intent on each character. And so these characters and their objectives remain unclear and fluid. The dancers move somewhere between perfectly executed moves and acrobatic realities, both through hyper-flexible spinal columns and with limbs used interchangeably (legs as arms). In a twist of the dream-like, transcendental elements that mainly dominate, the work seems to reproduce gender stereotypes with regard to the performers’ outfits, the dynamics that exist between them, and their abilities.

The muted music does not impose itself on the movement. It does, however, work alongside everything else to create an imperceptibly tense atmosphere. The green and yellow tones in the lighting bring to mind the northern lights or the ethereal mists that drift through dark fairytales. The costumes – with their black lace and see-through panels, combined with the use of familiar but not necessarily useful objects, such as felt, balloons and LED lights, which are transformed through their informal choreographic setting into dance episodes, dresses, and teleportation devices – create the feel of some indefinable romantic epoch.

Finally, a sense of reverie threads through the entire work, without moments of climax save for the very end. The dancers bring a borderline fairytale story-in-progress to the stage, sprinkled with nuggets of teen terror, leaving us to wonder what our own reverie would be – which characters we’d choose to include, and what characteristics they’d have.

This new work by Georgia Tegou and Michalis Theophanous unfolds in a strangely other world, where the boundary between what is real and what is imaginary is difficult to determine. Beings reminiscent of the fantasy universes that exist in the films of Guillermo del Toro – “Pan’s Labyrinth” in particular – or drawn from dark medieval fairytales, as well as from mythology, are constantly interchanged. The aim of this roll call of creatures is not to induce terror, but rather to spark curiosity and interest.

The art direction of the work’s scenic environment works in tandem with the performers to intensify the fairytale atmosphere. The use of lighting as props, and the ways in which these are handled by the performers, constitutes an unusual situation that matches the rhythms of the performance; it does, however, also result in some gaps in the show’s flow. The interplay between the performers and their own shadows offers up an illusory optical experience reminiscent of the work of the Pilobolus dance company.

Addressing as they do the collective unconscious, the two choreographers tell a tale of archetypes through an associative kind of narration. It challenges audiences to dive into their own fantasies, and to extricate themselves from the logic of needing to give specific meanings to everything they experience.