The blueberry glut has largely been dealt with. Many of them have been eaten fresh and some have been frozen for later use. AF made some muffins yesterday and methinks I’ll concoct a clafoutis for tomorrow night. But today was all about jam.
Almost 5 years ago, I tried making lemon marmalade with a swag of lemons I ganked after climbing a neighbour’s fence. Alas, I cooked it too long, not having a thermometer, and I renounced jamming there and then. Nevertheless, the call to jam was undeniable and I took time to consult the oracle … but the CWA cookery book doesn’t have a single effing entry on blueberries. Anyway, this is approximately what I came up with…
Makes about 7 cups jam
6 cups fresh blueberries
4 cups sugar
juice of 1 lemon
40g pectin
Don’t wash the blueberries but do remove manky looking ones, stems etc. Crush or blitz half the blueberries, then put them in a very big pot (jam bubbles up like crazy when it’s cooking so you don’t want the ingredients to sit even halfway up the walls before cooking). Add the other blueberries whole along with the rest of the ingredients. Heat slowly til the sugar has dissolved then crank up the heat and boil them intensely for 5-7 minutes depending on how runny or set you like your jam. There’s plenty of thorough info on all the vagaries of pectin, jars and sterilisation on the web and on the back of pectin packets, so I won’t go into that here.
We picked around 12kg of blueberries today from a friend’s property. The blueberry bushes have been there for decades and are now completely untended, unwatered, unpruned and unsprayed. With dozens of rows of bushes, we barely scratched the surface. Having eaten around 2kg with our hands, the next few days will involve trying to work out how the hell to use them all. Stay tuned.
A great market day lunch. Straight from the monger to the pot. It all takes 15 min tops.
Serves 2 to 3
a big splash of extra virgin olive oil
4 cloves Australian garlic chopped finely
1 can diced tomato
1 kg fresh Tassie mussels debearded
plenty of chopped parsley
bread to mop up with
In a deep stainless steel pot, fry the garlic in oil until just golden, add tomatoes and cook for a minute or two until that tomato is practically krumping with bubbles. Add the cleaned mussels in one go (not too violently) and slam on the lid. Leave for 6 minutes. Add chopped parsley at the end, stir through and then ladle mussels and the attendant juices into big bowls. Provide napkins and a bowl for shells, it’s gloriously messy stuff. If you have enough bread, you could eat the whole dish without cutlery.
Best banana loaf recipe ever. Baked New Year’s Night as a treat for the W’town and Glenlyon crews. Massive props to the Penmans for sharing. You can halve the quantities to fit into a standard bread tin, just reduce the cooking time to 45min.
Serves plenty, unless you’re a fatty
225g butter
2 cups sugar
1 cup honey
4 free range eggs
5 or 6 bananas (tip: put overripe bananas in freezer and then thaw them, they come out pre-mashed)
3 cups plain flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
a sprinkling of Australian walnuts
Cream the butter and sugar. Mix through honey, then eggs one at a time, then bananas. Sift flour, salt and baking soda together and mix into batter. Pour into a greased or lined cake tray of about 25x40cm, top with walnuts and bake at 180°C for 60min.
My first go at baked eggs happened impromptu for New Year’s Day breakfast. Taking my cue from a half-remembered dish at Birdmann Eating, this could pass as an eggy riff on puttanesca though the feta adds a pleasingly Hellenic touch.
Serves 2
drizzle of olive oil
1 teaspoon Carmelina Spaghetti Condiment (a shortcut way of adding chilli and sundried tomato flavour … if you’re in Melbourne, get it at Mediterranean Wholesalers)
1 can diced tomato
1 gregarious tablespoon of capers
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
4 free range eggs
a wad of Dodoni feta
parsley to garnish
sourdough toast plied with extra virgin olive oil
bacon (optional)
In a cast iron frying pan heat the first five ingredients on the stove top until the tomatoes have reduced and the whole thing looks the colour of a British tourist in Dubrovnik. Take off the heat and crack the four eggs on top of the sauce, then crumble the feta on too. Put in a preheated oven of around 200°C (I played around with the temperature as I peered through the oven door, so don’t take my word on it) and leave in there until the egg whites are semi-cooked (keep an eye on them, we’re talking a few minutes here). Fry some bacon while all this is going on and toast some bread, you know how to do that. Then put the eggs and tomato under the grill to finish off. The idea is to have the bottom cooked, the top cooked and the centre on its way, so that the yolks can still break free once you spoon them over your toast. Chop some parsley for prettiness and season for saltiness.
It is a truism to say that Hofesh Shechter’s dance pieces are as much about music as they are about choreography—in the double bill of Uprising and In Your Rooms, Shechter is credited with creating both. Indeed, his interest in their combination is hardly novel ground for dance, but his capacity to synthesise their impact on an audience together with a cinematic sense of imagery is the key to his popularity.
Uprising begins with a steady slightly metallic beat, a bank of spotlights tilted towards us and haze swarming portentously across the empty stage. From somewhere behind the lights emerge seven male dancers heading downstage with a determined gait. The air is menacing but Shechter subverts the expected and just as the men can go no further, they arrest their charge by lifting a leg to their other knee and holding themselves in a sweetly balletic stance. The line is ordered and controlled—a display of technical acumen certainly—but the image it presents is only a whisper away from collapse. These men are vulnerable in their balancing act.
As the beat continues to drive on, the men slide out of formation looking dejected, defeated even. Shechter reportedly created Uprising in response to the 2006 riots in Paris, though thematically it feels more like a response to the banlieue riots of 2005, which were more palpably and brutally linked to the ennui of disaffected young men. However, to see Uprising as a political statement is problematic. The real source material is testosterone and, as it does in life, it peaks at puberty. Uprising is less an investigation of men and militant outrage than it is a celebratory omnibus of adolescence. Yes, the dancers show us forms of violence, rebellion and manhood, but they are mock displays, the simulated games of boys testing their own limits and not to be taken too seriously—the pants are khaki but the label is American Apparel.
The music is a propulsive assemblage of percussion that whips the choreography along rather than merely accompanying it. In the words of one of the dancers, Chris Evans, Shechter “liberates the dancers from chasing a meaning around” by using music to set the tone. The result is a physical language that, in being both persistent and simple in its intention, is remarkably legible without dipping too often into literalism. The dancers respond with powerful abandon: throwing their arms back as they run head down, breaking formation in fits of individualism, using their hands to slink across stage like simians, wrestling and caressing. Throughout, flashes of popular dance genres emerge—the negation of the lower body typical of breakdance, the bopping kick of skank—as does the unmistakable urban dubstep of Vex’d with their track Thunder.
With a barren stage and a highly structured beat, Shechter has to find both engaging imagery and fluidity in the bodies on stage. Lee Curran’s sharply focussed spotlights provide pools of visibility that the dancers slide in and out of. Trios and duos flicker past each other in discreet frames like spatial cross-dissolves. When dancers are shrouded in darkness one feels that they have not exited so much as briefly moved out of frame. And when Shechter has all seven dancers working in unison, he is amplifying the human form as a cinematographer might do with a close up. The result is spare but extremely beautiful.
Uprising finishes with a spurt of bathetic triumphalism. The men construct a limp flag-waving human pyramid equal parts French Revolution, Soviet agitprop and summer camp. In some respects, the finale makes sense as the antithesis of the opening image—asymmetrical and multi-tiered rather than a strict line. But it also feels like a cheap shot. The preceding dance has already done the work of dismantling order and control, but rather than living up to or even coveting the title of Uprising, Shechter shies away from revolution and delivers a safe implication of delinquent folly.
A similar whiff of shyness was sensed next door at Look Mummy I’m Dancing, written and performed by Belgium’s first transsexual Vanessa (Van Durme). Adapted from her own book of the same name, the show is a sort of staged Bildungsroman that tells the story of Vanessa’s transformation from a troubled boy into a troubled woman.
For a show based on a very fundamental questioning of gender, Look Mummy I’m Dancing manages to shy away from questioning traditional gender concepts. Vanessa begins her monologue with a story of a couple at a checkout line. In both subject matter and delivery it feels like the anecdote of a stand-up comic pointing out the banal universal tropes of married life for us to both recognise and find funny. One expects this cliché of binary gender absolutes to then be undercut by the subsequent story. Yet, save for a few moments of inner conflict, the tone never really shifts. The writing constantly finds ways of being relatable, hackneyed, earnest and predictable.
Occasionally, often in moments of dark, visceral humour, a real theatrical tension is evoked between Vanessa’s delicate aspirations and the staggering pitfalls of her life. And one might argue that it is not her role to do anything but tell her own personal story, rather than speak to the conceptual or the societal. However, too often, the narrative metes out to incidental players the same one-dimensional characterisations that are supposedly the bane of Vanessa’s own existence and skirts across stories with nary a sideways glance at insight.
A similar problem befalls Anna Tregloan’s The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Taking the art of public transport eavesdropping and mashing it with the Dadaist penchant for collage, Tregloan has shaped a piece of theatre out of verbatim transcripts of one-sided conversations on trains. The concept itself is cheekily promising, with non sequitur humour and pathos possible at every turn, but the various components never quite slot together.
Tregloan takes advantage of the Meat Market’s extraordinary depth by creating a train carriage out of rows of chairs but, in spite of her design credentials, the set is otherwise underdeveloped and lacking in detail. Tregloan’s 2007 work, BLACK, with its refractive centre of characters, was as much a spatial installation as it was a performance, and that level of attentiveness to the audience’s relation to space was sorely missed in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. The unhindered distances around the performers created an unfocused, centrifugal effect that compounded the fractured nature of the narratives, leaving the audience to forage for meaning from afar.
Wrapping up many people’s Festival experience this year was Le Salon from the Belgian company Peeping Tom. Partly borne out of the Belgian powerhouses Ballets C de la B and Needcompany, Peeping Tom are a collective of artists orbiting around the central creative partnership of dancers Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier. Each of the performers, including a mezzo-soprano and an actor, bring their own idiosyncratic talents and foibles to bear. This, combined with the very real emotional relationship shared by Carrizo and Chartier, creates an onstage chemistry not dissimilar to that of an amiably dysfunctional family—sometimes pulling in very different directions but inextricably rooted in the same mire of history, experience and artistic heredity.
Le Salon is the middle section in a trilogy of work that loosely follows a family through a cycle of generation and degeneration. The gently decaying wood panelling of the set is at once an allusion to a bourgeois grandeur of the past and a presaging of the characters’ internal declines. With only a sparse use of text, the theatre, humour and intelligence of the piece is in the bodies and the music. And both, while brimming with technical mastery, are also able to seethe with the signs of downfall. Though at times it threatens to undermine itself with overplaying, Le Salon beautifully delivers what it sets out to do—to intimately make flesh the fear of loss, the fear of death and the fear of not noticing it arrive.
This article originally appeared in print in RealTime 94, December-January, 2009-2010, page 4, and is reproduced with permission.
http://realtimearts.net/article/issue94/9630
Phillip Adams’ choreography sometimes repeats a physical action until it achieves the transcendent extremity of a ritual. By taking on the subject matter of mass hysteria and apocalyptic cults, where the held breath of expectation is clothed in mantras and cyclical behaviours, he has found a fitting underpinning.
In BalletLab’s 2007 Brindabella, the piece was literally bisected by four dancers jogging in near-unison around the stage. It went on for far longer than one expected and, in doing so, it suspended the audience from any act of judgment or any desire to draw literal meaning. It was a relatively unadorned pause in between more elaborate worlds on either side. It acted as an enforced threshold, the thud of footfalls was mesmeric and the circling bodies were hypnotising. We were being lulled into a different state.
In Miracle, it’s all about different states—the hallucinatory, the delusional, the ecstatic, the postmortem. We start in a state of quiet dislocation. The space is filled with brightly lit haze, creating an obscuring curtain of white. As the haze fades, four figures are revealed far back on the stage. They stand in a line, in loose-fitting robes: orange, yellow, blue, green. The costumes, by fashion designer Toni Maticevski, are a confectioner’s riff on tie-dye.
The dancers retain their stance and their silence for a long, enticing moment. After all, when you are waiting for the end of the world, anticipation is the key. Then, suddenly, and with great force, the sky opens up and peals of sound rush forward along with the dancers. Their bodies carve out a diagonal sweep and the speakers crush out an orchestrated wall of strings, voices and beats. Holding hands, the dancers retrace their steps, their mouths agape with cries, and they cross forward and back again and again until their efforts drive them into prostration. The effect of such intensity could be galling, eviscerating or transformative but the emptiness of the stage, marked simply by a square of grey, and the swathes of movement suggest an animated Franz Kline painting: urgent and physical, but safely contained on a canvas.
In a question and answer session after the show, Adams felt that this particular run of Miracle had been “too cosy, too comfortable” for the performers. He stressed the importance of the hysteria being experienced, not merely represented. Yet, he also spoke of his desire to achieve a “cinematic” effect. Perhaps he meant something else with this statement, but it seemed at times that the performers were fully enveloped by the experience, yet in the vast reaches of the Meat Market they were held at a projected distance from us that was neither threatening, nor fully engaging—we were invited to watch them but not to feel like one of them. We witnessed hysteria and ecstasy, but were never transported to that state ourselves.
Hysteria and performing arts are hardly strange bedfellows. The success of a theatrical experience usually demands a communal suspension of disbelief, arguably an act of mass hysteria. Thus, in making the experience of hysteria the sine qua non of Miracle, Adams binds the success of his concept and choreography to the success of its mass reception.
Nevertheless, even on a “cosy” night when the fever doesn’t quite set in, the extraordinariness of Miracle’s components is apparent. The stunning score is a joint creation by David Chisholm and Myles Mumford. They mix and process a range of diegetic and recorded sources live for every performance, in what they describe as a “plunderphonic” composition. In the large, blank space, the multiple speakers cut through the air giving shape to the void.
The performances, despite Adams’ qualifications, display a rare mix of sensitivity and visceral dedication. BalletLab’s work has increasingly tilted towards the second part of its name and the exploratory nature of experimentation requires a very different specificity to that of ballet. Like Deborah Hay’s company of dancers in the recently toured If I Sing to You, the dancers in Miracle are constantly aware of the whole and not just themselves. The result is an apparent freedom of form, an organic flow of actions and reactions that feel autonomous rather than directed.
This performative freedom and the permutations that result suggest the centrifugal whirling of a dervish. From the original point of stillness and silence, Adams spins Miracle into sound and fury, we pass whirling rag balls and extension cables, we circle bullhorns and clogs until, in a final astonishing image, having exited Earth’s gravitational pull, Miracle hovers weightlessly in a moment of divine suspension.
This article originally appeared in print in RealTime 93, October – November, 2009, page 37, and is reproduced with permission.
http://realtimearts.net/article/issue93/9593
The titles of Lucy Guerin’s recent works have been marked by clarity and transparency, even literalness. Structure and Sadness dealt with the aftermath of grief caused by the West Gate bridge collapse. Melt was a duet for two water molecules that move from ice through to steam. Corridor limited itself to a long traverse stage and took a corridor scene from Kafka as its inspiration. And now Untrained juxtaposes two artists trained as dancers with two artists untrained as dancers.
Contrast these examples with the titular and choreographic opacity of Shelley Lasica’s Vianne and there would appear to be nothing hidden in Guerin’s world, nothing that is so mysterious that it cannot be elucidated in a simple, perfectly decipherable title. For her critics, this is a cause for frustration: her works can be seen as the physical equivalent of begging the question in rhetoric, where the proposition assumes its own truth before being argued. In other words, is the dance redundant once you read the program notes?
Yet, aside from the inherent value judgements involved in meriting metaphor over literalness, describing Guerin’s dance as redundant is to deny its capacity to transcend the admittedly literal text that tries to encapsulate it. Guerin is not given to ornateness in her language but her sensibility for the human form is far from plain—the duets across her body of work are remarkable in their mesmerising intimacy, their detail and their capacity to enliven the space between the dancers as much as they animate the bodies themselves. Moreover, by starting with such conceptual distillation, Guerin’s work emerges from a kind of purity, with every subsequent extrapolation seeming to fit and flow on perfectly from the last.
Indeed, it is a questioning of purity that lies at the heart of Untrained. The title is easily decipherable, yes, but what is it to be untrained? Is the untrained body pure in its movement—unfettered by the conditioning of choreography and exercises? Or is it the trained body, in its refinement and exactitude, that achieves purity by sublimation? Guerin is certainly not looking for an easy solution to this dialectic. She is interested in what it does to us as an audience and to the performers themselves to see these questions made manifest by exploring the continuum from pure naivety to pure technique.
Her staging of Untrained maintains this notion of purity. The set is nothing more than a grey playing square marked out by broad white lines. It is a clever delimiter, its form suggestive of a playground ball court or a boxing ring—both stages perhaps but ones not restricted to the arts. The performers never leave our sight, yet, with just one exception, only when they enter this square are they viewed. This is no geometrical sleight of hand. What we are witnessing is an experiment where we are the lab technicians and this square our Petri dish. By placing contrasting physical presences in the same space one after another, Guerin provides us with a microscope through which to examine the idiosyncrasies, the likenesses, the differentiators and the foibles of four bodies in motion.
The identities of these four bodies are important to note. Byron Perry and Antony Hamilton are two wunderkinder of the Melbourne dance scene. Not only are they ubiquitous presences in the works of Lucy Guerin Inc and Chunky Move, but they are also celebrated choreographers and visual artists. Their untrained co-performers are Simon Obarzanek and Ross Coulter, who are both visual artists. So, as it happens, all are men and all are visual artists.
To begin with, the performers present themselves to the audience one at a time by standing in the centre of the square for a few seconds, doing nothing. They have been asked to be neutral. However, each of them carries a stamp of personality and of habit, and we see this. From this starting point, Guerin uses a succession of provocations to tease out different performative languages: sing a song, be a cat that gets electrocuted, copy your partner. At times, the audience laughs at the ineptitude of the untrained. At times, they laugh at the hubris of the trained. As the work progresses, the laughs dissipate and the analytical eye is no longer restricted to the audience — the performers themselves begin to reflect on how they compare with the others and, vitally, are asked to speak to their own image.
This article originally appeared in print and online for RealTime Dance Massive Special, March 2009, and is reproduced with permission.
http://www.realtimearts.net/feature_contents/Dance_Massive
The Hong Kong Arts Festival began as a private initiative in 1973. One year later, in a moment of belated British pragmatism, Chinese was finally recognised as an official language by the colonial administrators, though the Arts Festival cannot necessarily be held responsible. So, in this part of the world, millions of people were taking a first step out from the shadow of Empire. Move across the Pacific and one year further on, to 1975, and the Wooster Group stages its first production in New York.
Now, as part of the Hong Kong Festival’s 37th iteration, the Wooster Group has dusted off its rendering of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones for another outing. Originally conceived in 1993, this production is the culmination of the Wooster Group’s deconstruction of blackface. Of course, there have been (and there still are) some observers who consider it merely a reconstruction of blackface. But, back in 1981, before The Emperor Jones was even conceived, the company produced Route 1 & 9, the first part of The Road to Immortality trilogy. Route 1 & 9 was welcomed by a gale of controversy, partly because of its blistering desecration of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town but largely because of the use of blackface in this desecration. The calls of racism and insensitivity reached the bureaucratic halls of the New York State Council on the Arts, which severely cut the Wooster Group’s funding as a result, citing “harsh and caricatured portrayals of a racial minority.”
The director of these productions, indeed the director of all Wooster Group productions, is Elizabeth LeCompte. Grey-haired, with lucid, dark-green eyes, LeCompte has a compelling demeanour that fuses a cutting intelligence with unassuming blitheness. When she is asked a redundant question that presupposes her answer, she sees it for what it is and is curt. When asked about her upcoming work, she turns to her producer, Cynthia Hedstrom, for support or deliberately undermines herself with humour. Yet she also shows an unerring confidence in the scope of her imagination and her ability as a theatre maker when she says, of her upcoming adaptation of Vieux Carré by Tennessee Williams, that she is inventing a “completely new form of naturalism.” LeCompte sees every performance of every Wooster Group show in order to take notes and gauge the audience response, but she claims to be utterly disinterested in comparing her work to that of other theatre makers, preferring to watch films, musicals and “lots of television.” This ability to focus her attention on her own work combined with her steadfast sense of artistic vision and purpose might explain why, notwithstanding the volume of criticism, the Wooster Group continued its use of blackface in not just one but three separate shows.
Amidst all this offstage politics, the visual aesthetic that most clearly infuses The Emperor Jones is that of Japanese Noh theatre. One sees it in the costuming and in the gestural language of the performers. Also, one sees it in the makeup. The character of Henry Smithers, a British trader, appears in Noh-inspired whiteface alongside Brutus Jones’s blackface. It is a deliberate counterpoint that manages to underline the use of blackface while simultaneously shifting the cultural reference points with which we view it. In other words, what the Wooster Group have done with blackface is to make it a performative, rather than a pejorative, mask.
Yet, beyond any theatrical coup de grâce that one might ascribe to this deconstructive effort, the reason for LeCompte’s initial interest in staging The Emperor Jones is less grand, though no less valid. Kate Valk, the actress who plays Jones, had appeared in blackface in previous Wooster Group productions and, in LeCompte’s words, was “developing a voice” that LeCompte thought was worth exploring—O’Neill’s text provided the perfect vehicle for a more detailed outing. For Valk, the opportunity to play behind the mask of blackface is an opportunity to be liberated as an actor, to be freed from the psychological barriers of the self and, as a result, to be fully present in the immediacy of the stage environment. Valk explains this by referring to the “two-step process of denial” that wearing the mask entails. First of all, the mask allows the performer to deny their own subjective psychological presence. Second, in then denying that the mask itself exists, the performer is able to fully disassociate their self from the situation and inhabit the stage as an other.
As with the visual aesthetic of the show, Valk’s investigation of masks is indebted to the Noh tradition. Indeed, there are videotapes of Noh theatre that play on a loop on screens that face the actors—Valk is given to watching them as a point of focus in what is, at times, a solitary stage existence and she relishes that she can randomly incorporate gestures from the videos in her performance as a way of keeping things fresh, all without the audience’s knowledge. However, to suggest that the entire show is an ode to Noh would be an unfortunate feat of elision. The Wooster Group work so meticulously on their productions and from so many angles that their work defies such a reductive suggestion of provenance. The choreography for various dance interludes is snatched from Hawaiian folk dances; the sound design draws on cartoon sound effects; the video screens present distorted low resolution images that create a deliberately damaged but exacting accompaniment to the live action.
Somehow, in all this feeding on references, LeCompte’s team of collaborators find a distinct and unique theatrical language that, like herself, has two complimentary aspects: one rapier sharp, the other playfully obtuse. The red flyswatter that almost becomes an Oriental fan, the incongruous soccer shin pads, and the stage assistant that almost becomes a character all create a slightly tattered sensibility and remind us of the theatremaking. On the other hand, the technological integration, the dynamics of the show and the performances by Valk and, on alternate nights, Scott Shepherd and Ari Fliakos, are far from tattered.
Near the beginning of the show, Valk sits in an old office chair in the centre of the space, her costume is a ragged riff on a kimono, she holds a microphone on a black stick and wields it as naturally as one of her own limbs, or as jauntily as a cane. The whites of her eyes, luminous within the thick mask of blackface, dart and roll, her lips and teeth stretch their moorings as she plunges her voice into a growling baritone. Valk’s virtuosity is astonishing and powerful. She is a picture of both precise stylisation and humanity limited by stylisation. The blackface that, on the one hand, causes furore and, on the other, liberates the actor is more than the sum of its parts. By casting a white woman in blackface, who so accurately, yet so artificially, recreates the stereotypical idiom and mannerisms of a black man, we see the performative nature of the character himself—a man unable to escape the hateful script dealt to him by a history of slavery, subjugation and segregation.
Across the Hong Kong harbour, two weeks later, Akram Khan and Juliette Binoche shared the stage in their self-devised dance duet In-I. To say that Binoche is not renowned for her dancing prowess might imply a dry reproach for a foolish endeavour. Yet, the truth of the matter is that it is exactly because she is not an accomplished dancer that this show even exists.
In-I sits in that realm of contemporary dance theatre often occupied by Jérôme Bel (Pichet Klunchun and Myself) and, newly, Lucy Guerin (Untrained). It is not the tanztheater of Pina Bausch or Meryl Tankard, but rather a dialogic medium that investigates the gap between the physically articulate and the physically inarticulate by juxtaposing them on stage. Bel achieves this through a simple conversation, Guerin achieves this through follow-the-leader games, but In-I tries a more unwieldy and less formally clarified combination of choreography and text that butt up against each other but rarely intersect.
Binoche initiated the project after seeing one of Khan’s dance pieces. It is a credit to Binoche as an artist that she so forthrightly ventures into unknown territory, but there is a sense that Khan has not fully met her enthusiasm with his own. Though Binoche does not quite achieve the extension and line that one takes for granted in a trained dancer, she executes the choreography with unceasing energy and alacrity, even as the sweat pours down her face and her hair becomes a tousled mop that defies her film star credentials. On the other hand, Khan is a performer of stoic restraint and economy, whose face is a stern glaze from start to finish. When Binoche’s arms open outwards, they do so to welcome something in with generosity. When Khan extends his, they seem to deflect and defend. Certainly, there is something of the feminine/masculine binary at work here, but Binoche’s presence is more engaged, more fluent, where Khan’s is determinedly one-note.
In the end, In-I is, as its eponymous pronoun suggests, less successful as a duet than it is as an insight into two very different artistic talents. The one liberated by exploration, the other troubled by the unknown.
This article originally appeared in print in RealTime 90, April-May, 2009, page 6, and is reproduced with permission. http://realtimearts.net/article/issue90/9393