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The Perils of Mixed Media
| Article
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17634 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1990 |
1,613 Words |
| Author
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Kathrine Sorley Walker
Kathrine Sorley Walker is ballet and dance critic of the
London Daily Telegraph (London) and author of Ninette de
Valois: Idealist without Illusions (Hamish Hamilton, London,
1987) and De Basil's Ballets Russes (Atheneum, New York, 1983). |
These days modern dance and mime companies offer theatrical mixes of every kind. Everything is grist to their mills: dance and mime, speech and song, cinema and video with every type of musical or rhythmic sound accompaniment.
A British company that is daring and successful in this Mixed Media style is called Second Stride. The name needs a brief explanation. Back in 1972 Richard Alston, then a highly promising dancer trained at the London School of Contemporary Dance, formed a small group that he called Strider. In the way of such ventures it made its mark and then disintegrated. In 1982, however, Alston (now director of the prestigious Rambert Dance Company) decided, in collaboration with Siobhan Davies and Ian Spink, to resuscitate the defunct Strider as Second Stride.
Collaborative Effort
Second Stride, as it stands today, represents Ian Spink's beliefs about dance theater. Spink is an Australian, and before coming to England in 1977 he had moved from classical ballet (the Australian Ballet) to modern dance (Australian Dance Theatre and the Dance Company of New South Wales.) As obvious influence at one time was Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal, which created immense interest when first performed in London. For her extraordinary full-evening works like 1980 and Kontakthof, Bausch developed a closely woven mixture of movement, method acting, dance, and mime - and it is this formula that Spink has very intelligently adapted and developed for his own purposes. He is, however, more lyrical, so the result appeals to the heart as well as the senses.
Bausch is not the only German producer of Mixed Media shows. Equally positive and memorable is Johann Kresnik. Kresnik is a fifty-year-old Austrian who went from being a toolmaker's apprentice to working in dance and drama. He danced in Cologne for five years, became ballet master and choreographer in Bremen in 1968, and more recently worked in Heidelberg. Last year, at the Edinburgh International Festival, he staged an unforgettable piece based on Shakespeare's Macbeth. Bodies in baths and pails of blood emphasized that this production was all about multiple killings. Images of violence and cruelty were created by Expressionistic means that seemed typically Germanic. It was perhaps supposed to be an indictment of man's inhumanity to man, but it tended to elicit curiosity or disgust, rather than pity and terror. It moved from one shock to another, either visual, as when Macbeth drank blood from the false breasts of the three witches, or aural, when heavy steel
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