by Venice, already a city of timeless beauty, becomes more filled with art during its famous biennale, founded in 1895. The exhibition has grown to include various art forms, including the smallest dance biennale known, which started in 1999 and takes place every year. The dance series has upped its game under the direction of British choreographer Wayne McGregor – now Sir Wayne, after being knighted in the King’s birthday honours. McGregor took over in 2021 and has just been reappointed for another two years.
It has registered a wide range of international artists, well known and otherwise, with an unexpected strength. This year’s theme is We Humans, a title that might conjure physical bodies and emotional connection, but the opening weekend’s performances focused on physics, formal systems, business brains and interactions with technology, in line with McGregor’s own sums.
The show that gives shows is the European premiere of Waves by Cloud Gate Dance Theater in Taiwan. For nearly 50 years Cloud Gate was run by founder Lin Hwai-min, with a recognizable aesthetic that felt rooted in something timeless, even ancient. Choreographer Cheng Tsung-lung took over in 2020 and barring the dancers’ talent for the odd movement, it could be a completely different company, influencing the technology of the future in this collaboration with digital artist Daito Manabe . Waves changes the details of the dance body through AI, often through mesmerizing backgrounds, splintering, flickering, a visual intrigue win, something at the expense of interesting choreography.
It confuses the senses. The body crosses the stage with long strands of light flowing behind it, like a huge silver mane filling the space. Is that a real person, or a projection? It’s really impossible to tell at first. We see a man facing a digital creation, completely absorbed and ignoring the other person on stage. The interaction between the human and the digital is an undercurrent, and who is in charge; the uneasy relationship between ourselves and the zeros and the flashy ones.
It’s the complete opposite of Waves, so it could go on tour in your hand luggage. Trajal Harrell is the recipient of the biennale’s Silver Lion award, which is awarded to a pioneering young artist (Sister or He Buried the Body). Harrell is American, but his success is mainly in Europe – he had a major installation at the Barbican in 2017. Harrell’s works are densely academic and direct, setting up movements from the history of dance, particularly vogueing, and in this piece the Japanese form of butoh. In this solo, Harrell is seated, in a skirt, legs spread wide, eyes closed, hands raised pleadingly in front of her face. He hums along to a playlist of Sade and Everything But the Girl, which he indicates by tapping the iPhone next to him, but the low-key 80s pop suddenly becomes moving as Harrell’s face sinks into his silence pain. Very theatrical, but very private at the same time.
The festival’s top honor is the Golden Lion, a lifetime achievement award, although this year’s choreography goes to a choreographer most dancers in the UK will never have heard of. Seventy-year-old Cristina Caprioli was born Italian, danced in the US and Europe and settled in Sweden in the 1980s where she runs the company CCAP. In New York in the 1970s she came across postmodern dance and you can see her ideals of form over performance, pedestrian over virtuosity here, although Deadlock, a solo performed by Louise Dahl, is quietly virtuosic in its own way.
It comes with a poetic foundation – death, dead end, impasse – and Caprioli’s dance is an exercise in physics, researching the momentum of centripetal forces in Dahl’s spinning body, drawing and redrawing circles around the floor. At one point Dahl is standing still, her closed fist slowly opening and closing, open and close, like a flash of light, and it’s a wonder to capture it. Perhaps because the performance is trained our attention to focus on the smallest movement. Dahl is remarkable, everything completely precise but still not forced, as if her body is the vessel for these physical forces; she barely makes a mark in the space, and yet she is a very strong presence. Sounds unbelievable, but that’s how it feels; so much happens in the dance in the unknown space.
Another physics-driven piece, Barcelona-based Guy Nader and Maria Campos’ Natural Order of Things (AKA GN | MC) is a balm for the overworked brain, the murmurations of its nine dancers out in front of you, beautifully lit, like to watch the patterns of nature without returning. Painful to gravity, it begins with a body line that leans to the side (Smooth Criminal Style) until the weight lifts them and they fall into a lilting pattern back and forth, like tides in the lagoon of Venice. The momentum builds until bodies are thrown into the air, drifting and falling, but always returning to the ebb and flow, the rules of weight, velocity, balance. He is quietly happy.
Watching show after show at a festival can be distracting, but certain moments will stick in your mind. In The Bench, a new creation by Caprioli with the students of the Biennale College, an initiative for young dancers, the performers position themselves acrobatically over benches in a public park under the blistering midday sun. At one point two young men end up on the same bench. One gently leans on the other’s shoulder. The other person looks at him. And from nowhere it is suddenly, immediately, intimately human.
