Anyone looking for meanings or message can rack their brains for a long time. Grace Ellen Barkey offers you the choice: an hour and a half spent struggling, saying ‘wtf?!’ or plunging into the world of Alice in Wonderland. Wee wah Wonderland all the way.
In this production, Probabilities of Independent Events, the choreographer draws you into a nonsensical story of unbridled enthusiasm and youthfulness. The rhythmical clapping, set off by the dramaturge Elke Janssens, is the starting point for an extremely dance-oriented and personal performance. The whole company is onstage: a dancer becomes a singer, the dramaturge a musician. And one thing is clear: everyone deserves a pedestal. After an intimate beginning, you are overloaded with a kitsch collage of pop songs and a mix of dance, street theatre, circus, performance and music.
What starts out as peculiar soon becomes infectious. But this doesn’t happen just like that. The choreographer demands an audience with nerve, one that dares to let go, that takes a child’s view. Amusement and entertainment are to the fore in this festive opener. It forces you to let go of your critical view. The turning point comes with Bill Withers’ Lean On Me. After the umpteenth repetition of the phrase ‘call me’, the viewer and listener has no choice but to give in to folly and futility.
The trick is to enjoy the leaping, twisting and flowing bodies, the atmospheric play of light, the stirring music, the humorous sketches, the youthful, simple, spontaneous, vigorous, grotesque, vital, fast living, which is all this production aims for. Such uninhibited pleasure in performing is not self-evident for a contemporary audience that is used to content and social criticism. So this is a bold move by Grace Ellen Barkey. A performance like this seems a surprising choice for the Concertgebouw. However, the simple eagerness is refreshing and provides a surprising breath of fresh air. Yet there is one clear message: open up your senses to the remaining performances at December Dance, just that.
Simply being together and laughing, not thinking, letting yourself be swept along in a world you did not previously know, can have a liberating effect. Or, as Joshua, one of the dancers, confided in us after the show: ‘sometimes it’s fun not to know’.