Helpless/peerless in the wind
Marnix Rummens - www.dansand.be (-- July 2012)

The perfect headline act for Dansand!: Needcompany’s 25 Moves! The remix of live music, dance, costume and visuals to celebrate the company’s 25 years washed over Ostend’s beach on Sunday night in a swirling rush of images. After all, when man, puny and mortal as he is, with everything in his power enters into a struggle with the eternal sea, madness, love, excess and beauty invariably find themselves on a collision course. Needcompany’s opening image immediately struck the right note. A colourful theatre troupe in the distance on the beach, dancing, singing unamplified at the top of their voices. Performers who intrepidly dare abandon the comfort and certainties of the theatre so as to use the overwhelming space of the beach and its poetic power to the full. No one else did this so convincingly at this third Dansand! festival. Meg Stuart had done it before, but she maintained her dominance using Jozef Wouters’ excavators. Alexander Baervoets’ meditative set-up also made a courageous start, but remained cautiously contemplative. And in First Dates and David Hernandez’ Thirst the beach setting was used mainly decoratively and the performance itself remained close to the audience. Needcompany did not start out from the theatre conditions that the open-air stage tries to offer, but drew its freedom of movement from the obstacles in this vast setting. They regularly took up the challenge of the acoustic duel with the beach. Though later on they came closer to the audience to continue their jam session with amplification. They must have realised a rock concert is impossible without loudspeakers. And the sultry music by the company’s resident composer Maarten Seghers was soon balancing at full power between song and soundtrack. At the same time there was more happening on the beach than you could see at one glance. Your gaze wandered off to watch the extravagant sight of Grace Ellen Barkey as an Oriental goddess, while elsewhere a lively dance duet could be seen. In the meantime one performer was transforming into a fabulous creature with the aid of Lot Lemm’s vividly coloured costumes. The trip you find yourself on opens up a fantasy world that can be movingly gentle one moment and caustically sharp the next. Although 25 Moves is based on Needcompany’s visual arsenal, this performance is above all an ode to man and his imagination. This hybrid of theatre on location and jam session turns out to offer the performance significant oomph. It provides energetic variation, so that the audience is impressed either by the nifty dance moves and hallucinatory costumes, or by the extreme mental states the lead singers Maarten Seghers and Joeri Cnaepelinckx dare to seek out. At the same time this keeps things exciting, because the certainties of theatre conventions are removed and genres are constantly combined. The boundary between performer and character is sometimes so unclear that changing costumes becomes an act in itself. And by deliberately holding a jam session with existing musical and dance phrases, the company transcends the impasse that faces a lot of the performers at Dansand!: either to make use of the surroundings by means of improvisation, and thus risk sketchiness, or to put on an existing piece that limits the role of the sea to that of an idyllic backdrop. The leap Needcompany dares to take with its studio material calls out loudly for freedom. Daring to give yourself the room to respond to a completely different setting, without having everything under control in advance. In this sense, 25 Moves celebrates the quest Needcompany has been on for the last 25 years: experimenting with an approach to life that tries to distil beauty out of pain, lightness out of loss, strength out of overwhelming odds. Daring to explore and question one’s own physical and artistic limits, daring to come up against them, knowing that this fragility can give rise to a poetic power. Practising this transformation from powerlessness to strength. This is the foundation that Jan Lauwers and Grace Ellen Barkey have created for their company over the years. Ready for the next leap forward. This is clear from the promising young talent that finds a home in Needcompany. The fact that everything keeps on flowing is probably the only certainty you can really count on.

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