Dancing like a colliding ice floe: Julidans shows a world in motion

Just a little while and it’s over, the Julidans festival, with many performances, some of which were made just before or during the corona crisis. This year was, as it were, a catching up for makers and festival, which resulted in two packed weeks, with almost 40 productions, almost 70 performances at fourteen locations. A bit much maybe, but that’s okay.

In addition to an inventory of the state of international contemporary, generally more theatrically oriented dance, it also provides a sort of current affairs section. Just about all urgent, topical issues come in a wide variety of forms and styles, with concern for the climate and the earth being one of the most important. But also (new) feminism, gender, decolonization, migration, new rituals, hyperconsumerism and other matters are not shunned.

The festival sketches a world in motion and is marked by a kind of desire for new ways of living together, with each other and with the planet.

Antarctic Ice Shelf

Movement in the most literal sense sometimes: in the opening performance Larsen C Christos Papadopoulos refers to the steady crumbling of the detached Antarctic ice shelf Larsen C. With beautiful light effects, smoke and dancers that move like a heaving mass and sometimes collide like ice floes, Papadopoulos creates abstract, oppressive images. For a long time we don’t get to see ‘the whole picture’, usually parts of bodies emerging from the dark. You would almost forget that the underlying thought is less attractive.

Anything but abstract is on the other hand Ginkgo by Nicole Beutler; a kind of preachy educational theater with a mountain of garbage (inevitable: the supermarket trolley), little dance and a theremin-playing ‘angel’ who explains everything again. Beutler has become known as the inventor of intelligent concepts, but here she tumbles back to the (expensive!) school performance.

Highlight festival: ‘Mountains’

One of the performances in which the desire for a new world is most strongly expressed, and therefore of enormous expressiveness, is On earth I’m done by the Swedish-Dutch Jefta van Dinther. He has been returning regularly to Julidans for a few years now and has created, among other things, the oppressive, hallucinatory duet Dark Field Analysis (2018) deeply impressed. In particular the first part of this diptych, the 75-minute solo Mountainsis a highlight of the festival.

In a steady, uncompromising build-up, the fantastic Marco da Silva Ferreira and the stage image that is as simple as it is sublime go through a transformation in parallel; the person who feels overwhelmed by a changing world, the world that is constantly changing. That world is symbolized by the meter-long strip of fabric that covers the stage floor, and is slowly pulled into the ridge in an hour and a quarter, creating new landscapes each time. Ferreira measures herself against that force of nature, but eventually has to reconcile.

part two of On earth I’m donethe group work Islands, shows a post-apocalyptic world, in which structures are not yet fixed. The direction of human development that Van Dinther outlines here is reassuring on the one hand, because united, but the consequence is less cheerful: a robotic, empty crowd.

Hugely exciting

It’s really exciting Re:Incarnation by Qudus Onikeku, who also wowed audiences in Amsterdam with his dynamic blending of Yoruba tradition and the contemporary dance culture of Lagos with its huge youth population. And that ancient rituals, shamanism and spirituality in the depths of authoritarian Singapore effortlessly go hand in hand with queerness and voguing (modern house dance), documentary theater maker Choy Ka Fai shows in the surprising Yishun is burning†

The title is of course a nod to the famous documentary Paris is burning (1990), about gays and transgenders in the New York ball scene. The Singaporean suburb of Yishun can rival that city with some crazy trance culture, according to the astonishing documentary footage, which is intersected by live dance from vogue star Amazing Sun and a live video link to Singapore.

There is also ‘just’ dancing

Within Julidans it almost feels strange, but yes, it does happen: there is also, more or less, ‘normal’ dancing. By David Raymond and Tiffany Tregarthen, for example, where the spectator could imagine himself at the Nederlands Dans Theater, but less exciting. Louise Lecavalier (63) also dances, still. She’s restored her peroxide blonde mane from the La La La Human Steps era and it’s unbelievable how she controls her body, with torso that must be reinforced concrete. She accurately portrays different states of the dance body: fluid, controlled, meditative and obsessive, sometimes showing how much of her dance language was incorporated into the material of her former employer Édouard Lock at the time. But it is mainly her physical presentation, not so much the choreography that inspires admiration.

And that’s how it goes up and down in Julidans, and that’s how it should be. Festival favorites may disappoint (Florentina Holzinger, Hooman Sharifi, Beutler) while unknown creators steal the show (Onikeku, Fai), a sign of good health for contemporary dance. Now the world.