The fun thing about lavishly funded French festivals like Montpellier Danse isn’t the crowd-pleasing headliners but the idiosyncratic oddities that appear in their interstices. Lisbeth Gruwez’s solo Tempest is one of these.
The stage is a large white square set diagonally against the black floor, its upstage corner bent upward into a precipice overlooking the back of the stage. To Maarten Van Cauwenberghe’s relentless but nuanced electronic score, surging and fading in waves, Gruwez, in loud red, white and grey sports gear, performs an unusual rearrangement and shuffling of limbs and stances, stern in its precision and affect, with echoes of the martial arts through which the piece channels its subject: anger.
Or perhaps the anger resides in the elements around her: fistfuls of chalk, an endless red ribbon, dry ice inundating the stage until the white peak resembles a glacier. In the final image, a rotating sequence of spotlights flashes faster and faster, Gruwez’s shadow circling her at frantic speed, as if the sun spun around the earth. She stands practically still in the eye of this storm, the hero of a story painted entirely in the abstract. ●
Dom Czapski’s trip to Montpellier was supported by Agora, Cité Internationale de la Danse
