#tordre

[vhscorp]

Prenez soin du cœur des autres, c’est si fragile, un cœur : ça peut se serrer, s’affoler, se tordre, se fendre, se briser, et à mon sens, le mieux à faire pour y arriver, c’est de garder le cœur ouvert…

V. H. SCORP

[northernbluetongue]

Victorious

So am I the only one who thought it would be perfect if Tori and Andre started to date, they have the perfect chemistry to make an AMAZING couple like when they sang the song “Tell Me That You Love Me Anyway” was AMAZING!!!

[artsculturebeat2016-blog]

A pirouette of memory(loss)

By Christian Erin-Madsen

What are experiences without memory?

Are they lost to us in a life made less valuable? Or are they more precious, an ephemeral gift? The scenically spare, yet striking Tordre (Wrought), which made its premiere on October 13 at the Crossing the Line Festival in New York, deals with both living and memories as parts in a string of experiences that time eventually subsumes.

The piece sets up two dancers on a white-coated scene, with parallels to tabula rasa, a clean slate of mind, beautifully by Rachid Ouramdane. A choreographer active since 1995, Ouramdane makes a specialty of tailoring his dances to the specific personalities and life histories of his dancers, and he has done that strikingly well here.

One of the dancers, Lora Juodkaite, is dressed completely in black in order to hide everything but her face and feet. The other, Annie Hanauer, wears a tank top revealing that she wears a prosthesis on the lower part of her left arm.

The hour-long performance develops into a thoughtful, captivating play on themes including life cycles and body awareness, expressed through dance and music. It plays on time passing by: Two black metal pins stretch straight down from the ceiling – each with a short metal pin fitted at the bottom, as if simulating two large bird perches. When they start moving clockwise the parallel of time is almost too obvious.

The two dancers start out by starting all over again. They come on stage to a recorded orchestral overture led by a horn ensemble of and they leave. The overture is repeated as if on a broken record. They re-do it again and again and alter their approaches by dancing, running, then again walking as if resembling not only repetition, but also how difficult it can be to get started on anything, only to realize that once you’ve started everything comes natural. It’s a nice parallel to life.

The first part consists of a key being struck so quick as to make the heart race. Then, slowly, the music shifts into a more mellow and mature heartbeat - a lounged approach somewhere between trip-hop and the ambient music of Brian Eno. Accordingly, Lora Juodkaite enters as a ballet-esque spinning top.

Rachid Ouramdane has successfully implemented the elegance of her dance in opposition to the more robotic, raw moves of her counterpart, Annie Hanauer. That part becomes all the more relevant when Lora Juodkaite, in the third portion of the piece, starts expressing abrupt sentences. She begins: “You will stay here in my heart, no matter what they say."  She adds, “I will always have my feelings” (a reference to an earlier moment, when a charming live performance by Nina Simone of the '70s ballad “Feelings" is sounding from the speakers), while Annie Hanauer, as the only person on stage, moves around quirky, robotically and seemingly without feelings. She continues, “I don’t know why, but just before the start my heart was beating so fast.”

Is she speaking on behalf of both? Is she referring to reality, or is it all metaphors for the bigger struggles in life? We don’t know. But we do know that we all hope that someone is there to catch us when we step out of line. “Tonight I will try not to go too far,” Lora Juodkaite adds a bit later. She spins around and Annie Hanauer catches her, only to shortly after let her go again, sending her off spinning in another direction, like a toddler tossing around. And she catches her again elsewhere on the stage. It's an elegant parallel to the viewer’s experience: Amidst the pure aesthetics, we are continuously taken by the hand.

How does it end? Perhaps the best way possible, with the beginning. We rewind to what actually happens after that broken-record intro. They perform a 50’s-style rock 'n' roll dance. It is synchronized and suggests the highs of life as well as of memory: When we try to memorize our lives, don’t we always tend to focus on the happy parts?

This piece sets out as a portrait of two people, visualized by contemporary dance, semi ballet-moves and robotic structures. An hour later, we are left with an attempt to open up and show the many sides of one person’s life. The repetitions and cycles, the highs and lows and the parts that took hold in our memory.

[artsculturebeat2016-blog]

A Dance of Shadows and Sorrow

By Saudamini Jain

The evocation of sorrow can be cathartic. On Friday evening, Rachid Ouramdane’s Tordre (Wrought) induced intense feelings of sadness, but without any release.

Ouramdane, an Algerian-French choreographer, is not well established in the United States. His pieces, often with political themes, explore personal experiences of people. He intersperses dance with videos, voices, and other media to present docudramas – which have been acclaimed globally.

Tordre, which made its U.S. premiere at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York as part of the ongoing Crossing the Line Festival, is a tale told largely through dance. It is the story of its dancers: Lora Juodkaite and Annie Hanauer. The two women are the choreographer's longtime collaborators; in several interviews, Ouramdane has called this piece their “portraits.” For the most part, it is not a duet, but sequential solos.

The setting is minimalist: The set comprises a pair of metal structures – each, a set of perpendicular poles hanging from the ceiling, like swings. The dancers are dressed in black. Their shadows are background performers in their own right – they take different forms, on the stage, on the walls, in two, sometimes threes, depending on the adjustment of light.

The show opens with snazzy show-tune music – the original-cast recording of the overture from the 1963 musical Funny Girl – as Juodkaite and Hanauer walk around the stage, prance, pose, exit, re-enter and repeat. This goes on for a few minutes, before they take turns to express their suffering:

Hanauer twists and bends, she stumbles to find balance – she’s jerking her body as if in great pain. That Hanauer wears a prosthetic left arm is an incidental detail: it seems to makes no difference to her dancing.

She lies down on the stage. Beneath her, the poles cast the shadow of a cross. Is she waiting to be resurrected?

Juodkaite enters, spinning on herself. As she spins, she circles the stage – her shadow diverges into two, then converges into a circle with an orb. She spins around supine Hanauer, around the other pole. She covers – it seems – every inch of the stage, spinning. A few times, Hanauer tries to stop her, she holds her in a light embrace, but as soon as she lets go, Juodkaite starts spinning again, as if to say: pain is within, and nobody can take it away.

Eventually, Hanauer gives up, and exits.

Juodkaite spinning is like an optical illusion. It would be impossible to calculate her speed, even with a stopwatch. When she tilts her head, it’s almost as if its bobbing on top of her whirling body, unattached. When she folds her hands behind her back, it’s almost as if there are two of her. This is magical in more ways than one: it is spellbinding. If this were an Internet video, it would be watched on loop.

But it has filled the air with gloom. When it stops, the tension in the hall is still palpable. It is broken with Hanauer dancing to Nina Simone’s cover of the “Feelings”. The stirring song, about “feelings of love”, is a live recording from 1976, in which, Simone improvises about her disbelief at “the conditions that produce a situation that demanded a song like that”. Her comments made her audience applaud, and this roomful of people chuckle. Hanauer’s movements are lithe and airy, she jumps, breaks into a run, dances with an imaginary partner. The song ends with, I will always have my feelings, nothing can destroy that, ’cause I know that that is all that that is…

Hanauer lays down on the swing. If only the piece too ended at this point, about 50 minutes into the show.

But for a quarter of an hour, Juodkaite returns to spinning, this time with a microphone. She talks about her beating heart, how spinning makes her calm, she talks about spinning as a child, that it was forbidden. Her feelings, interrupted by heavy breathing, seem banal – perhaps even more so because they follow Nina Simone’s live recording of “Feelings.” Juodkaite says, “Let’s just go somewhere, where reality doesn’t control everything." She seems to be referring to the place she took us to while spinning. Her vapid speech is a distraction from the spinning, that only a few minutes ago, had been so sublime.

This is a pity, because storytelling has been regarded as one of Ouramdane’s greatest strengths. His previous pieces, Ordinary Witnesses and Far, had been considered powerful portrayals of the horrors of imprisonment and war.

In an interview earlier, Ouramdane had said that Tordre is a “portrait of two people, two women, two artists.” Ultimately, though it comes across as none of those things. It is a portrait, but of sorrow, and the shadows make it even sadder.

The show ends like it had begun: with the adrenalized show tunes. This is a happy ending, but one with an unsettling aftertaste. It inspires you to try spinning at home to soothe your nerves.