Dance review: Ballet de Lorraine’s Acid Gems & a Folia pop at Southbank Centre
Photo by Laurent-Phillipe
Adam Linder’s Acid Gems and Marco da Silva Ferreira’s a Folia both pop as ensemble pieces with instantly recognisable aesthetics – holding true to a trend for live dance as music video concept.
Two adjudicators in bright Lycra sit on observation ladders as the audience files in, wearing cloth face-masks that give anonymity to their postures of judgment. They aren’t concerned with us, so much as the equally luminous ensemble, who, bursting into the space, operate between these ladders, and their attending ball-boys, with metronome rhythm and increasing freedom.
Like many contemporary dance pieces on today’s scene, Acid Gems presents a community with its own idiosyncratic movement vocabulary, that entangles and disintegrates with the quality of biological cells. What makes this piece successfully different, is its use of angular, classical positions – with a quirky focus on coupe, arms in third, and some trilling entrechats – all to the tension of a Wimbledon-style, bat and gasp sound.
The dancers represent gender neutral ballet as their efforts are interchangeable, and bodies appear similarly flexible and strong without the typical sculpting of athletes. As they jostle, extend and, at one point, gibber as a flat pyramid on the floor, the effect is one of humour and empathy for these try-hard creatures, not unlike us.
Based on Jewels by Balanchine, Acid Gems offers a more gutsy vision of vanity and chutzpah than the original.
The Folia takes us back into the choreographic territory of a circling, organic mass with break-out performances and variations, but this time in a familiar world – nineties rave culture.
Marco da Silva Ferreira’s piece takes inspiration from an ecstatic folk party in 1500’s Portugal. As such it effectively leans into elements of traditional storytelling that stoke engagement with the piece.
Particularly engrossing is the solo of the bird-like woman, danced by Céline Schoefs, who lingers through her time centre-circle like an ominous crow. Also gratifying, is the company’s repetition of a bellows-blowing mime, which evokes layers of meaning – from peasants stoking the engine of commerce, to communities maintaining a primal source of life. A Folia’s group engage sympathy with their plight in the same way the Acid Gems do.
The unexpected insertion of fugues taken from a Corelli Violin Sonata, and given a Draughtsman’s Contract-esque reimagining by Luis Pestana, suddenly give the piece extra dynamism halfway through – continuing until a bawdily triumphant and vigorous end.
As a double bill, Ballet de Loraine has brought the Southbank Centre two parties inspired by divergent decades, which entertain independently and share each other’s pop aesthetic values.
