Festival Dance
monumental
Playhouse, Edinburgh
Mary Brennan
five stars
THE MUSIC starts drifting through,in wisps of wild melody, while the front curtain is still down. What kind of world lies behind it? A distinctly dystopian one that Canadian choreographers Dana Gingras and Noam Gagnon modelled on their own times – and though monumental was created for their company, The Holy Body Tattoo, in 2005, this blistering, unstinting revival reeks of urban tensions in the here and now.
On-stage, nine dancers in workaday clothing are in isolation atop individual pedestals. Awakening, they don’t actually look to escape; instead they endlessly display the minutiae of reactive coping mechanisms. For the next forty-five minutes the five women and four men go stir crazy. Nervy fingers scrabble and scratch at random itches, claw at face and scalp, tear fiercely at hair and flesh. Bodies wrench and double over, as if gripped by inner pains. Even when figures straighten up, assume martial arts stances, appear to exorcise the anger and anxieties that jerk them around, there is no real let-up – how could there be? They’re in a rat trap of a society, and the live music that powers out from Godspeed You! Black Emperor pounds this reality into them with volcanic drum blasts and crescendos of soaring melancholy.
And then – there is a revolution. A breakaway leap from plinths to floor and into community, where human contact will surely alleviate the loneliness and reward the dancers’ singular endurance, yes? No. Projected texts encourage defensive mistrust in the name of self-preservation, video images reinforce the sense of humanity at bay in a techno-mechanistic world, the sound levels rise – and meltdown arrives in a vortex of violence that annihilates all hopes of redemptive neighbourliness. It’s Armageddon spelt out in sweat-drenched, exhausted bodies – grimly compelling, not least because we recognise its bravely unsentimental truths.
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