Dance Umbrella calls itself "one of the world's leading dance festivals", presenting "brave new dance"; the highlights of this year's programme have been retrospectives of works by Merce Cunningham, Richard Alston, Candoco Dance Company and Karol Armitage. As for the rest of their programme... tonight showed me that Dance Umbrella are committed as ever to investing in the "what is dance?" debate and continuing to programme and promote physical theatre.
The Place has been enthusiastically recommending Caterina Sagna's "Basso Ostinato"; described as three men "reminiscing about their ballet-dancing past, complete with luridly scatological tales from the rehearsal room", it sounded similar to Winter Guests' "Avenida Corrientes" (details), featuring the breathtaking Daniel Proietto in a dance theatre work as the muse of Andrew Wale's choreographer. In the 105 minutes of Avenida Corrientes, we saw the ten-year relationship between the two characters, the progress of their final work together and the tragic destruction of their relationship: not a minute of this piece was wasted. It was hoped that "Basso Ostinato" would be much the same.
This was not to be the case. "Basso Ostinato" opened with a table and two chairs at the front of the stage, with a TV behind the table showing a production of Giselle filmed at La Scala. Towards the rear of the stage, we could see a row of bottles and condiments, with a subtitles screen against the rear wall - positioned sufficiently high for the audience to be able to watch the screen or the performers, but not both simultaneously. The dialogue - in French, occasionally in Italian - opened with two men speculating about male pattern baldness in principal dancers, followed by "Man B" reciting an excerpt of a poem, both men crudely commenting on the screening of Giselle beside them, leading "Man A" into an anecdote of one rehearsal where he ended up "shitting his pants". Of all the potential reminiscing and luridly scatological tales, this was sadly the full extent, even if it was repeated continually throughout the evening, with minor alterations each time. The alterations were presumably the barometer of their scripted inebriation.
Antonio Montanile appeared onstage during the first retelling, initially to move the TV offstage in order to replace the onscreen dancers, moving distractedly while the two men continued to talk, yet managing to obstruct "Man B" as he walked over to the rear of the stage to retrieve another bottle of alcohol. Montanile started moving closer to the table, making a nuisance of himself and being swatted viciously to the floor each time until one of the men managed to wrestle him into a chair and seemingly adopted him as part of their group.
The repeated text alternated with sections of group movement, yet it was all too evident that the performers were not trained dancers, and that the choreography was uninspired, underwhelming and apparently without context. At one point - after each of the men had ripped up and eaten their scripts - the men staggered to the rear of the stage in their death throes. They did this eight times. After the eighth time, they proceeded to writhe individually, then took turns to die in each others' arms before seemingly overcoming death and returning to the table for yet another repeat of their stories.
"Basso Ostinato" teased us with multiple false endings, and in fact exceeded its advertised running time by the time it had found a suitable ending to conclude with. Surely the death throes scene would have been a natural end. Or when each of the performers collapsed in various parts of the stage, with one smoking a cigarette as the lights faded. Or one of the many times when the performers slithered off the stage.
While repetition lay at the heart of this work, repetition is a tricky choreographic tool, producing amazing results in the right hands - eg Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker's 'Rosas Danst Rosas'; in the wrong hands it can appear lazy, uninspired or even amateurish. Given the merits of the original concept of this piece, we can only speculate what this piece could become if it had more time to develop further; each of the sections suffered from being drawn out for too long, with too little content and too little creativity to sustain its length.
Nevertheless, all was not lost; Philippe Gladieux's lighting design for this piece was beautiful, while the highlights of the evening were the brief glimpse of Giselle, and the copious amounts of passive smoking.