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The Avignon Festival 2006 - A Personal Encounter (Part IV)Reviews (7)Jacqueline Fletcher visits the 60th Avignon FestivalDateline: 27th August, 2006Asobu, choreography Josef Nadj in the Cour d'Honneur When I saw Barbarians I had one of the better seats in the middle of the bleachers (which would have been at the back of a more traditional municipal theatre space). For Asobu, I had one of the worst seats in the house, vertiginously high above the stage, about six rows from the back and on the very edge of the row, so that I was looking at the dancers from the extreme side of a stage unnaturally wide. It was terrible. What should have been the highlight of the festival - Nadj's centre piece - was simply too distant. Greek amphitheatres might have been built to hold 17,000 spectators but this space was not built for theatre and if it is to be filled to capacity then the majority of the spectators will be subjected to an in-built distancing mechanism. Nadj speaks of his admiration for Artaud, and this can be seen in his work, but for the work to carry the full weight of feeling that Artaud deemed inescapable, one needs to be drawn in, to be engaged, and this is impossible if one is seated on the sides or beyond the halfway point of the audience seating. It is also possible those sitting too close to the stage would miss the desired effect because the stage itself is much wider than it is deep. I decided that if I am to go to Avignon again, I will book much earlier when I can choose my seat. Nonetheless, Asobu was fascinating in its eclecticism and I came out wanting to see it again from a better position. It is a homage to the writer Henri Michaux, and so it is concerned with journeys, crossing borders, challenges and transformations. In fact, it represents the sum total of those themes that are set out elsewhere in the festival throughout most of the programming. Nadj, of course, embodies the journeying artist, crossing borders personally and professionally, crossing disciplines and cultures. Unlike most 'dancers' Nadj started training in adolescence in martial arts, moving on in his early 20s to mime and only then to dance training. His initial training was in plastic arts and music (free improvised jazz), so his work is rich in influences and varied in its images, its media, its shades of light and shadow. He cites Zen Buddhism as an influence, and Chinese calligraphy, Japanese Butoh, the Spanish sculptor Miquel Barceló with whom he performs in the shorter piece Paso Doble. For Asobu, which means 'game' in Japanese, he has six Butoh dancers in the company. The back wall of the Cour d'Honneur was swept (that is exactly the word) by tantalisingly vague but evocative projections of galloping horses and fire and striking images: fragments. These were rendered even more fragmentary and ephemeral by the rough stone and the windows that broke the surface. In a discussion Nadj indicated that these had been inspired by nomadic tribes that had roamed his own central European homeland for millennia, and Attila the Hun who had reached the gates of Rome, like Avignon a Papal city. It is impossible to do justice to Nadj in a short review. His entire oeuvre is fascinating and strikingly original in its blend of influences and styles of movement. One constant throughout his work is the black or blue suit in which he, and many of his dancers perform. The music is also dissonant and strange; composed by Akosh Szelevenyi, it is difficult to pin down and label stylistically, but it certainly hits the right note for the piece. Nadj's world is always a surreal place of strange creatures and uncanny atmospheres and this musical score underpinned that ambience. Disjointed and disturbing, it gets under the skin. Nadj is adamant that the ultimate virtues of free improvised jazz lie in its capacity to force the listener to learn to listen again, and he believes we have become so lazy in our perceptions that we go with the flow of the expected and use only a fraction of our capacity to be awoken by sound and music. Our ears need re-training. Szelevenyi's score is certainly realms removed from the harmonious accompaniments to most contemporary dance. In fact, Nadj's entire oeuvre sets out to confound our expectations of sound, movement and imagery, and to force us to re-tune our senses. Nadj believes we live in a world threatened by globalised standardisation and mediocrity, of marketing that has usurped the imagination, of mechanised ways of functioning and automatic responses, so much so that our senses are being numbed and our human potential flummoxed. He sets out to make pieces that are an awakening, a continuous need for alertness due to proximity with the unfamiliar: in other words, the world of the traveller like Henri Michaux for whom every day every experience is new. This awakening, this ongoing alertness is an empowerment of the human imagination. >> Next
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