Out of nowhere the other day, Olive looked up from his computer and said, quiet-like, “Do you like mime?” It was so unexpected a question I said, in the grand tradition of do-first-think-later: “Yes?”
At the Mathurin Bolze show last week, the performers climbed up poles, crawled along walls, slipped and slid on moving parts of floor. They clambered and held tight and flopped about in a giant, slow-turning hamster wheel made of slats of handsome wood. So much of the show was dance and gymnastics and general gravity-defiance that I wondered how it had come to be described as “mime”. It is a curious thing, genre, because I would probably not have gone if the show had been listed in a programme of modern dance and I would definitely not have gone if it had been called performance art. Please – Olive wouldn’t even have asked. He may be a Frenchman smiling proudly over a flame-orange casserole of his beef compote, but he is not inviting me to a modern dance production any time soon. Emily and Marc were over to dinner a couple of nights ago and I made a spinach and mushroom quiche. Olive reached for the smallest of second helpings, a wobbly-edged sliver the size of a Sloane Ranger’s lunch ration.
“That’s all you’re taking?” I said. “Call yourself a man!”
“Hey,” he said, “I had eight hundred grams of your cauliflower gratin the other day.”
“Cauliflower?” Emily said. “I don’t think you’re helping your cause.”
He was unfazed. “There were,” he said, “potatoes in there.”
But Mathurin Bolze, which is a great name, the name of my nonexistent sausage dog, he has choreographed a thing that, in its own way, was all of these and more – dance et cetera, not cauliflower and potatoes – and I was open-mouthed and gripping on to the boy’s arm in wonder at much of the show Thursday night.
Part of the stage, at the Mathurin Bolze show, was a trampoline. You didn’t know it from where you sat, and the first time one of the performers jumped onto that space, you watched with wide eyes as the floor gave way and he bounced up again, weightless. The solid made supple, the concrete made compliant: the man fell upwards and downwards on the floor that wasn’t. Every preconceived idea rebounded with him.
In the vibratingly hot New York summer of 1998, CC and I went to see Nicholas Hytner’s production of “Twelfth Night” at Lincoln Center. Paul Rudd’s Orsino lounged by the edge of what was supposed to be a small pond before stripping off his velvet robe and plunging straight in. What looked like a simple watery onstage surface was, in fact, a real, live diving pool hidden in the depths of set designer Bob Crowley’s fantastical stage. In a single, clean movement, the Duke disappeared into the pond, feet first. I gasped, I think, if not out loud then certainly in my mind. In that moment when things are not what they seem, we experience a moment of blissful unreality. The ground moves beneath your feet. For one swooning, vertiginous instant, everything you know to be real is put into question.
At the Mathurin Bolze show last week, the performers climbed up poles, crawled along walls, slipped and slid on moving parts of floor. They clambered and held tight and flopped about in a giant, slow-turning hamster wheel made of slats of handsome wood. So much of the show was dance and gymnastics and general gravity-defiance that I wondered how it had come to be described as “mime”. It is a curious thing, genre, because I would probably not have gone if the show had been listed in a programme of modern dance and I would definitely not have gone if it had been called performance art. Please – Olive wouldn’t even have asked. He may be a Frenchman smiling proudly over a flame-orange casserole of his beef compote, but he is not inviting me to a modern dance production any time soon. Emily and Marc were over to dinner a couple of nights ago and I made a spinach and mushroom quiche. Olive reached for the smallest of second helpings, a wobbly-edged sliver the size of a Sloane Ranger’s lunch ration.
“That’s all you’re taking?” I said. “Call yourself a man!”
“Hey,” he said, “I had eight hundred grams of your cauliflower gratin the other day.”
“Cauliflower?” Emily said. “I don’t think you’re helping your cause.”
He was unfazed. “There were,” he said, “potatoes in there.”
But Mathurin Bolze, which is a great name, the name of my nonexistent sausage dog, he has choreographed a thing that, in its own way, was all of these and more – dance et cetera, not cauliflower and potatoes – and I was open-mouthed and gripping on to the boy’s arm in wonder at much of the show Thursday night.
Part of the stage, at the Mathurin Bolze show, was a trampoline. You didn’t know it from where you sat, and the first time one of the performers jumped onto that space, you watched with wide eyes as the floor gave way and he bounced up again, weightless. The solid made supple, the concrete made compliant: the man fell upwards and downwards on the floor that wasn’t. Every preconceived idea rebounded with him.
In the vibratingly hot New York summer of 1998, CC and I went to see Nicholas Hytner’s production of “Twelfth Night” at Lincoln Center. Paul Rudd’s Orsino lounged by the edge of what was supposed to be a small pond before stripping off his velvet robe and plunging straight in. What looked like a simple watery onstage surface was, in fact, a real, live diving pool hidden in the depths of set designer Bob Crowley’s fantastical stage. In a single, clean movement, the Duke disappeared into the pond, feet first. I gasped, I think, if not out loud then certainly in my mind. In that moment when things are not what they seem, we experience a moment of blissful unreality. The ground moves beneath your feet. For one swooning, vertiginous instant, everything you know to be real is put into question.
posted by stellou at 11:01 AM
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