A THUNDEROUS week when we’ve all been glued to the skies, trying to capture the glorious but fleeting pyrotechnics of Mother Nature, was outshone in the end by a flash of very human inspiration. A mesmerised opening night crowd spilled out of the Opera House mouthing ‘masterpiece’ about a contemporary dance work that yoked supreme choreography, a seamless score that drove a nebulous narrative and, above all, a ‘visual concept’ that engulfed your retina in rainbows.
The searchlights that intermittently sweep across the auditorium yank you out of any aesthetic comfort zone induced by the sheer beauty on-stage
A standing ovation then for Wayne McGregor, Jamie xx (né Smith) and Olafur Eliasson – yoked together by MIF’s departing ringmaster supreme Alex Poots, who has forged the identity of the festival by such canny creation of connections and collaborations.
A very MIF gestation, you couldn’t make it up – two years in the making after McGregor was asked what he’d like to base a project on. He chose US author Jonathan Safron Froer’s 2010 distillation of his favourite novel, Bruno Schultz’s 'The Street of Crocodiles', where he literally scissored out much of the Polish writer’s baggy text, creating a 134 page novella/paper sculpture called Tree of Codes (the new title’s letters cut from old title sets his stall out).
This creative annexation of another’s words ultimately proves a liberating influence for all involved in the free-form artistic prism of Tree of Codes the dance work, which daringly yokes together dancers from McGregor’s own company and soloists from the very different Paris Opera Ballet. They meld into a dazzling 75 minute whirl of movement, music and light that dissolves the tyranny of the proscenium arch as Nordic genius Eliasson wields colours and mirrors to disorienting effect.
The searchlights that intermittently sweep across the auditorium yank you out of any aesthetic comfort zone induced by the sheer beauty on-stage. Yet even here the tyranny of the mirrors, doubling, tripling the number of protagonists, induces the cold sweat of constant surveillance and manipulation. Perfect beauty can be totalitarian. Polish novelist Schultz (let’s not forget the grandaddy of Codes) was slaughtered by the Nazis in 1942.
Such is the dominance of the visual that boundary-pushing Jamie xx’s score is initially over-shadowed but increasingly its intense, unearthly, primal beats pull the strings of the (curiously democratic) shape-shifting dance combinations on stage. The sounds were created by extracting cut-out shapes from the book, ones that resemble the wavelengths of melodies, and transforming them on his computer. The arbitrary become flesh.
A masterpiece? Too easy to label, yet hard to ignore in this daring instance when the sum of the parts is so transcendent. Eliasson sums the whole collaboration up beautifully: “Clearly Jamie’s music can’t live without movement and space. Clearly Wayne’s choreography can’t live without sound and space. Clearly my art can’t live without sound and movement. Clearly creativity can change the world.”
Tree of Codes is at The Opera House until 10 July. BOOK TICKETS here.
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