Betroffenheit :Corporeal exchange as innovative now as the work of Pina Bausch in the 1970’s

Betroffenheit (consternation, a state of shock, dismay) a coproduction by  Kidd Pivot Company and the Electric Company Theatre. Written by Jonathan Young, Choreographed and Directed by Crystal Pite.

Here Betroffenheit  indicates very quickly,  a state of trauma, set off by a personal crisis that the individual, a lone young man enclosed in a hospital room, has experienced but , cannot get out of his mind. In spite of the presence of a psychiatrist, and of  individuals who seem to want to help him, the grief and the personal tragedy have possessed him deeply and we see how he can never escape their consequences no matter how hard all those around him appear to be helping  him.

Theatre as psychic therapy has already been on the dance stage of the NAC . If you remember  how the choreographers of the Israeli dance company LEV Dance, Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar sought out  expressions of obsessive compulsive disorder while  Ohad Naharin’s choreography Minus One  has a large group shifting and balancing  in a great collective poetics of corporeal disruption and psychic disorder.

Suddenly, the team of Crystal Pite and writer Jonathan Young  offers us a  most powerful  reading of Freud’s notion of trauma  , incorporating  bodies and voices  from the theatre (the milieu that is well known to the young man in question here) as well as finely tuned classically trained dancers who  adapt to all the choreographer’s stage images through varied forms of deep personal upheaval,  of  shock and tragedy, as the notion of sudden deep change  is  expressed through the  corporeal exchange that has  made the work of this team as  innovative as was  Pina Bausch’s work  in the  1970s.

Dance is now creating  models of performance that  draw on psychotherapy  that present models of artistic creation that can be  used to interpret, explain, represent, and even uncover  the  sources of a vast number of  disturbing  present day situations  that we don’t always understand:  fear of change,  fear of the “other”,  anger, political action  and even the question of  contemporary migration .

Interestingly enough, this  performance was “crystal” clear! A man is enclosed in a huge room with nothing  but a phone to communicate with the outside. He seems to be an inmate in a psychiatric institution.  At first, a long cable rolled up on stage starts to move by itself  almost like a snake that has come to life. As the image of this  lone  “creature” slides around, suggesting hallucinations, whispering voices echo in the background ,  repeating  questions and creating  confusion as they run  through his head, corresponding to questions that others might have asked him about his state of mind:  who are you, are you a user? Is he taking drugs?  Perhaps he should not answer, nor should he  try to explain they say. It will make it all worse.  He is projecting questions and answers, and adding to his confusion . Questions are repeated. There are references to the “accident” as we start putting the pieces together from the past.

Suddenly,  other figures related to the theatre swirl in and perform.  Their costumes are flamboyant, their faces are heavily made up. Thundering tap dancers and Carnaval is a  big ominous dance party with  cross-dressers, fluffy costumes  and red lips as these figures enter and leave, bringing him back to his theatre days on the stage. Lipsynching  their responses in a most perfect way as they are rapidly  transformed into hallucinations, projections of the disturbed  individual’s mind, the dancer who is enclosed in his room  alone and who is unable to explain what is happening as  the near monstrously strange dancing images  return again and again. Even the figure of the psychiatrist becomes a perfectly synchronized  rubber doll  ussing his arms and legs as flexible portions of his unspoken communication.

This interplay between the disturbed individual and the society he once knew becomes more intense  as these  figures become uncanny examples of various  dance styles even though they also appear to bring  moments of uneasy  fun and uncomfortable pleasure.   Christopher Hernandez as the cape swirling magician disappeared under his costume.   The   Carnaval Samba dancing, ballroom routine opened the gates to a twisted contortionist, dressed as a clown who smiled and coiled around her “victim” like that snake. There is also a  psychiatrist who  speaks in precise bits of language as his body jerks to the rhythm of the sentences and we see how they all appear to be almost robots, incarnations of the single  individual’s traumatized mind who cannot change anything but  who  keep  repeating what he wants to hear .

Grief, fear and loss  continually repeat  themselves in spite of all their apparent efforts but there is  no avoiding that which is and which will always be. Even if a taunting voice insists  that “you are getting better, you are surviving” ,  nothing changes .  In fact ” it” even becomes worse.

The electronic soundscape, especially during the second part becomes a powerful  presence where we hear clanging of metal, and bells – then  the crackling and crumbling of the world around the small group of terrified individuals comes from the world of performance . Almost as though they were appearing out of a mist, they are all  exposed to a large post standing upright  in the middle of the stage, stretching up to the top,   an unstable support for the surroundings to show  that could all come toppling down around them at any moment and crush them all. Thus the threat is ever present. There is no solution in spite of the calming voice that repeats “you have survived” But have they or has he?   And the insecurity continues, as the questions ring in all our ears…

At that point we see that this enormous metaphor  of a frozen collectivity,  caused by a state of ongoing crisis of  human behavior  forced, for example,  into a situation of migration  where groups are  constantly subjected to fear, anger,   uncertainty and loss,  are the perfect reference for this performance model.   In fact, there  is nothing outside this portrait of human relations because  the  performance has captured the essence of what  the world is living today. An extremely important stage  experience.

Betroffenheit  April 6-7^th 2018

Written by Jonathon Young

Choreographed by Crystal Pite

Performers:  Christopher   Hernandez, David Raymond, Cindy Salgado, Jermaine Spivey, Tiffany Tregarthen,  Jonathon Young , Yiannis Logothetis

Set design: Jay Gower Taylor

Lighting: Tom Visser

Costumes: Nancy Bryant

Composition and Sound design  Owen Belton, Alessandro Juliani, Meg Roe