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The Kunstenfestivaldesarts Diary (4)Dateline: 14th May, 2008It was a sunny evening and I'd already consumed enough mineral water to make me burst, so I wandered back to the Beursschouwburg through the small winding streets, keeping well in the shade and finally took shelter in the AB Café beneath the theatre itself. The food is excellent and very good value for money. The long, high tables are decked with thick white paper, on which one can doodle or scribble or write profound philosophical comments after a beer or two with pencils dangling on string. A young lady in a 19th century serving maid's uniform made from white paper walks around, changing the paper on the tables, clipping out interesting snippets and pasting them onto other huge pieces to be exhibited. This is a concept by Valentine Kempynck, artist and costume designer, and it will take place throughout the festival. On the wall there is already one witty offering: someone has drawn a microphone and a pair of headphones with text to indicate that the first world does the talking and in the third world they do the listening. In the washbasins in the loo a similarly interesting, socially responsible action is to be found. The face of an African child is stuck to the basin, its gaping mouth the plug hole. A text reminds us that we can have clean drinking water in one second, while he has to walk 20 km to fetch his! I won't tell you what I doodled on my table cloth as I munched on my salmon and sautéed potatoes with an excellent salad. I will come back to Kempynck's collaborative, audience-participation exhibition later. Now, however, I'm off to see the work of a Japanese choreographer. This is really a cross-cultural festival, isn't it? A Dutch visual and installation artist, a German composer/director, a Turkish dancer, and now for something Japanese. Tomorrow, thanks to a Swiss theatre collective whose members trained in Germany, I will be talking on a phone from Brussels to someone in Calcutta. It Is Written There I really do hope I can convince you to go and see It is Written Here. Kris Verdonck and Heiner Goebbels might be envisaging the end of mankind but Zan Yamashita might be its saving grace. His company are trying so hard to communicate, to understand communication, to make communication warm and human and funny. In fact, it gives you a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling and, moreover, it works on a variety of levels. Children will love it; they will have no difficulty at all understanding what is going on, because children are in many respects smarter than us grown ups, they are better communicators because they watch everything and never try to be too clever or to skip over boring bits to the bits that really matter. Children know what we have forgotten, that in communication everything matters, every movement, every tiny gesture, every facial expression, every sound and much more too. As we enter we are given a large book with the title on it. Inside we find that the pages are numbered from back to front, like Japanese books, but that otherwise things are written from left to right across the page in English and…well, also horizontally in Japanese. These are all snippets from Yamashita's scrap books, selected notes and diagrams, and drawings, the impression of a pair of feet soles, fragments from all the project books on his choreography that had been gathering dust for years. In many respects, it seems to be a reflection on his works, a questioning of all the things he has learnt and taken for granted over the years. A youngish Japanese man with a neat haircut and a smart suit and tie comes onto the stage with a microphone on a stand. He introduces himself amusingly, which is translated into French and Dutch in surtitles, and tells us that the book is ours so that if we want to lick our fingers turning the pages, it's OK to get our spit onto the paper. He gives us instructions on what to do and is our master of ceremonies, our intermediary. Zan Yamashita is a choreographer working in Kyoto who explores the relationship between the language of spoken or written words and the language of the body. This entails a challenge not only to his dancers in rehearsal and improvisation, but equally to the audience. When we have a written text to hand, does it affect how we interpret physical codes? Does verbal language proceed gestural or body language? Do gestures and movements illustrate verbal text or vice versa? When I see a movement, do I know what it means because it is written in my book? Or, do I understand what is written in my book when I see the movement? Do movements take me way beyond what I could imagine from the words in my book, or do they limit my imagination by acting out someone else's imagination? When do sequences of gestures start to add up to a narrative? Yamashita doesn't give you the answers. You have to think about it for yourself. His dancers are a delightful quartet of very different body shapes and personalities. There is no attempt to unify their energies or to disguise differences, as might be the case in some dance forms. Our master of ceremonies tells us the number of the next page in Japanese and English, and we see the written words and watch one or more dancers. Sometimes, they seem to be illustrating the concept on the page, at others there is humour or the unexpected. Sometimes they are connecting to us directly, like when one of the dancers spoke to the audience, in Dutch and French, reading from beer mats concealed in the cups of her bra, and asked us to pick out some phrases for her to put to movement. This same dancer was exceptionally good. Her economy of movement blended richness, texture and subtleties of expression with a sharp but fluid precision. I couldn't take my eyes of her movements. And this raises other questions. At what point does physical stature start to effect interpretation of meaningful movements? And dress? Hair styles? Two of the dancers were small and brisk, almost childlike. How much does their smallness effect my interpretation? Is movement really universal in meaning? Would a Japanese spectator find subtleties here I'm missing? To me, the highlights were when the master of ceremonies conducted a deaf choir singing in sign language. And each 'singer' definitely had a different 'voice'. Then, when he sang, or rather shrieked, the chorus lines to a rock 'n' roll song, with great emotion and enthusiasm but very out of tune, the audience collapsed with laughter. Another was when a dancer in a simple white shift performed a series of movements in different places on the stage, with different lighting, that changed our perceptions: was she a child or mother or both? But then, that's what I bring to the meaning. You might see it differently. There is the challenge, but also the generosity. This entire show was deceptively light and modest and polite. It hides a host of challenging questions. And as we all filed out, we were given a plain white plastic bag in which to take our book home, and the dancers and master of ceremonies were standing there, bowing slightly, smiling and saying goodnight. There are things to do and people to meet in the downstairs café, but I had notes to write up and a pleasant, warm sort of feeling I wanted to nurture. And more tomorrow. Jackie Fletcher >> Next
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