Pierre Rigal: Press at Gate Theatre

Pierre Rigal: Press at Gate Theatre

21 July, 2008
by: John Ellingsworth

Invited to make a dance piece in the extremely small 70-seat Gate Theatre, Pierre Rigal decided, brilliantly, to make it smaller. What starts out as a box-room, raised and lit in isolation like an observation chamber, further restricts as, at intervals and without warning, the ceiling rumbles and begins to lower. First Rigal is unable to jump, then to stand straight, then sit upright. With him in the room is a chair and an eye-like white light – articulated complexly by a robotic armature attached to the ceiling – which gradually reveals itself as a surveillance tool and agent of the room's controller.

Press is narrative dance of a kind: a character coping with the increasingly outrageous impositions of an exterior intelligence. What makes it great, theatrically, is that this basic story is embedded in the mode of performance — so moments of excitement and near-escape can be acted out by the ingenuity of the choreography in a situation where the possibilities for movement or dance seem so drastically curtailed. Near the end the ceiling is low enough that Rigal must lie on his side, the room a few feet tall and maybe ten feet across, and to explore the space he must push off the walls and slide one place to another; he does this tentatively for a while, then, as the background thrum lifts into something closer to music, he explosively kicks off one wall and slides to the other, turning instantly to kick out again, doing this over and over in a continuous horizontal somersault.

I don't know whether to tell you it's bleak. You are seeing someone slowly crushed – I guess that's a downer – but counterbalancing this there is a constantly renewed sense of elation that comes from seeing a piece of art-making so perfect in its execution and judgement. Perhaps most finely-judged is the wit of the piece. It struck me at the start that Pierre Rigal bears a remarkable facial resemblance to Derren Brown, but it also gradually became apparent that he is like Brown in his ability to work humour by the careful management of his own dignity. I have never seen anyone get stuck in a chair with such aplomb. And it turns out to be the exact right approach: never refusing what is desperate or extreme in the situation, but instead almost pausing it, creating a vacuum that draws laughter from the audience. Standing on his head, with his feet flat on the descended ceiling, all it takes is for Rigal to put his hands in his pockets, turn one foot casually out. These sorts of very simple human gestures recur throughout the piece, but are complicated by the fact that Rigal is not threatened only by the aggressive reconfigurations of the space: something within him may be taking over.

It's not explicit, and shouldn't be made so, but he is partly a machine, partly a man. He switches between organic and mechanic movement, and the tension between these two states, so minutely controlled, carries much of Press' (considerable) emotional force. When at the end Rigal confronts whatever intelligence controls the room and dismantles the eye-light, laying its armature across his own spine, he performs a short, extraordinary dance sequence that accommodates its reduced range of motion — but finds also, one last time, the slightest and most ordinary human gesture within it.


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John Ellingsworth