Already absurdly beautiful, Venice becomes even more filled with art during its famous biennale, founded in 1895. The exhibition has grown to encompass multiple art forms, including a lesser-known annual dance biennale that began in 1999. The dance series has upped its game under the direction of British choreographer Wayne McGregor – now Sir Wayne has been knighted in honour of the King’s birthday. McGregor takes over in 2021 and has been reappointed for another two years.
He programmed a range of international artists, well-known and unknown, with plenty of the unexpected. This year’s theme is We Humans, a title that might conjure up images of flesh and blood and emotional connection, but the opening weekend’s performances focused on physics, formal systems, busy minds and interactions with technology, in keeping with McGregor’s own preoccupations.
The extravaganza is the European premiere of Waves, a show by Taiwan’s Cloud Gate Dance Theatre. Run by founder Lin Hwai-min for nearly 50 years, Cloud Gate has a recognizable aesthetic that feels rooted in something timeless, even ancient. Choreographer Cheng Tsung-lung took over in 2020, and apart from the dancers’ sinuous kinetic abilities, this collaboration with digital artist Daito Manabe could be an entirely different ensemble, diving into the technology of the future. Waves transforms the dancing body’s data via artificial intelligence, often against mesmerizing, fragmenting, wobbly backdrops—a triumph of visual intrigue, albeit at the expense of compelling choreography.
It confuses the senses. A body passes by, filling the stage like a giant silver mane, with long strips of light streaming behind it. Is it a real person or a projection? In fact, it is impossible to tell at first. We see a man duetting with a digital creation, completely immersed and ignoring the other person on stage. The interplay between human and digital, and who is in control, is an undercurrent; the uneasy relationship between ourselves and the blinking zeros and ones.
The opposite of Waves is a performance so lo-fi it could be taken on tour in your carry-on. Sister or He Buried the Body is by Trajal Harrell, winner of the biennial’s Silver Lion for a pioneering young artist. Harrell is American, but her success has been largely in Europe – she had a major installation at the Barbican in 2017. Harrell’s work is both intensely academic and direct, layering movements from dance history, particularly vogue, and in this piece the Japanese form butoh. In this solo, Harrell sits in a skirt, feet wide apart, eyes closed, hands raised in front of her face in a pleading manner. She sways from side to side to a playlist of Sade and Everything But the Girl, which she cues herself by tapping on her iPhone, but the low-key 80s pop music suddenly pulls out the rug as Harrell’s face contorts in silent pain. It’s very theatrical, but it’s also very personal.
The Golden Lion is the festival’s highest honour, a lifetime achievement award, but this year’s award goes to a choreographer most UK dance fans have never heard of. Seventy-year-old Cristina Caprioli was born in Italy, danced in the US and Europe, and moved to Sweden in the 1980s, where she ran the CCAP company. She encountered postmodern dance in 1970s New York, where you can see the ideals of form over expression, pedestrianisation over virtuosity, but Louise Dahl’s solo Deadlock is quietly virtuosic in its own way.
There are poetic roots – death, dead ends, dead ends – and Caprioli’s dance is an exercise in physics, exploring the momentum of centripetal forces in Dahl’s spinning body, drawing and redrawing circles around the floor. At one point, Dahl is in a still pose, his clenched fists slowly opening and closing, opening and closing, like a flash of light, and surprisingly arresting. Perhaps it’s because the performance trains our attention to focus on the smallest movement. Dahl is arresting, everything so precise yet completely unforced, as if his body were the vehicle of these physical forces; he barely makes a mark in space, but he’s still an intriguing presence. It sounds counterintuitive, but that’s the feeling; the dance takes place in the realm of not knowing much.
Another physics-driven piece by Barcelona-based Guy Nader and Maria Campos (AKA GN|MC), Natural Order of Things is a balm for the overworked brain, as the murmuring of nine dancers plays out before you, beautifully lit, as if you were watching nature’s patterns emerge. An ode to gravity, the piece begins with a row of bodies (à la Smooth Criminal) tipping sideways until the weight takes them and they fall, swaying back and forth like the tides in a Venetian lagoon. The momentum builds until the bodies are thrown into the air, flipped over and falling, but always returning to the laws of tide, weight, speed and balance. It’s calmly satisfying.
Watching show after show at a festival can be distracting, but some moments will stay in your mind. In The Bench, a new piece Caprioli made with students from the Biennale College, an initiative for young dancers, the performers acrobatically position themselves on benches in a public park under the scorching midday sun. At one point, two young men end up on the same bench. One leans gently on the other’s shoulder. The other looks up at him. And out of nowhere, it becomes suddenly, instantly, intimately human.