If Closed Eyes As the end approaches for more than an hour, choreographer and dancer Alida Dors dresses in a stylized version of the traditional Creole koto, the wide skirt. She has embraced the past, history has also become her story, she is one with her ancestors, the ‘ghosts’ who gather on the film screen at the end. She tells. “I’ve been sampling and mixing and scratching my own religion / And broke it down into my new traditions … My story, no doubt bigger and older than me, it’s still mine.”
The performance outlines with spoken wordfilm images, music and dance the inner journey from pain, anger and sadness to purification and empowerment. Film images of dancer Dylan Kuyper, who appears to flee and falls into the Brokopondo reservoir in Suriname, symbolize that process. Under water he finds peace, united with his Maroon ancestors. They once lived, dreaming about a better life for their children, on land that was flooded by the Dutch colonizer to provide electricity for aluminum production.
Air bubbles
A lot has been invested in the design of the performance. The film fragments, projected on a large screen above the stage, provide an image of underwater life in the lake with, always beautiful, clouds of air bubbles that envelop Dylan Kuyper’s sinking body. Now and then the faces of the other dancers emerge, like apparitions in the water.
Not everything in the visual concept is equally successful. This makes the use of live camera images seem a bit fashionable. And the narrow mirrors that hang horizontally above the stage at one point lack any functionality. Moreover, the reflection does not provide an interesting effect, sometimes it is even ugly.
The poetic text that Dors himself recites is an important starting point for understanding the theme of the multidisciplinary performance; dance offers too little support for this. It was made in ‘co-creation’ with the seven dancers, which resulted in a choreography in a rather generic contemporary style, with traces of hip hop. It is apparently randomly divided into solos, synchronous and asynchronous group dances with a lot of rhythmic stomping and stomping. It is true that the frequently tense torsos create an illusion of pain and sadness, but the range of motion is mainly limited and sometimes even schoollike.
The dramaturgical concept is weak and too unambiguous, so that the summation of all elements does not provide any depth to the personal story that Dors wants to tell here. The emotion does not extend beyond the edge of the stage. What keeps the spectator awake is the strong musical accompaniment of Alvin Lewis, Patrick Mijnals and Jeremiah Owusu Ansah on bass guitar, percussion and keyboard. They know how to touch the audience, with heavy bass tones that vibrate deep in your chest.