Music, dance, film and performance art combine to dazzling effect in this new collaboration, says Tom Jeffreys.
Translating feelings into words can be a tricky business. Despite what the contemporary art world would have you believe – with its oft-nonsensical wall texts, exhibition catalogues, press releases, magazine reviews and vacuous interviews with babble-trained artists and curators – significance is not always a verbal or a logical phenomenon. In short, for something to mean, does it have to mean something?
This is roughly my thought process as I try to put into words the experience of watching Survivor, the art/dance/music performance event that opened at the Barbican last night. The result of a collaboration between contemporary artist Antony Gormley and Israeli-born choreographer/ composer Hofesh Sheshter, Survivor is a big, loud, constantly surprising, sporadically amusing, periodically quite threatening, treat of a show – but one that leaves me with not all that much to write about. The point being that this is not necessarily a bad thing.
In some ways, this is classic Shechter – full of noise and energy, with musicians on the stage and part of the spectacle, and a kind of primal, animalistic feel to the choreography. It's also very loud (although not nearly as loud as Ryoji Ikeda's terrifying datamatics that I saw here last year). But it's also packed full of the usual tropes you'd associate with Gormley – a focus on the dimensions, possibilities and limitations of the human body, an interest in the power of the plinth (cf One and Other and his recent project in the Hermitage), and some vaguely hippyish Buddhist leanings.
The result is something quite unique I think. From the very first moment, when a lone dancer writhes, Gollum-like, with his back to us, and Shechter himself turns his hand-held camera on the audience – to awkwardness and laughter – there's a sense of danger, a direct threat that comes not simply from the unknown but from our bodily immersion in it. It is this that makes later moments like the hundred-strong army of drummers so powerful. Even if some of their chanting feels a bit obvious (and the humming of the national anthem utterly baffling) there's a sense of confrontation that unsettles the audience. Similarly it is this sense of danger that makes the lone child with an acoustic guitar so otherwise inexplicably moving.
The threat is countered though by humour – a rare thing in the worlds of both dance and art. This comes mostly from Shechter's use of his hand-held camera to create moments of visual doubt and confusion. We see dancers writhing on the ground, but as a big screen descends, they appear to be dangling for dear life. The camera is spun round and round, but on the screen it seems that the world, not the camera is spinning. Later, we're seemingly taken on a tour of the bowels of the Barbican, before Shechter pops up unexpectedly through one of the many trapdoors in the floor.
Throughout, the music combines thudding blasts of hard rock knitted together by threads of folk-tinged strings. But it's the use of the space that is perhaps the most impressive aspect of Survivor. Lines of vision stretch all the way to the backstage storage area, whilst a huge tripartite scaffold looms above, accessed by long rickety metal ladders. The theatre's hydraulic curtain opens and closes like a vast industrial mandible, whilst the lighting rigs descend right down to head height. The stage is an active, interrupting landscape in which man's loud clanging becomes rather comic.
Survivor, however, is not an unmitigated success. In places its experimental nature causes a lack of coherent segues between one section and the next, whilst the big screen is not always used wisely: video footage of mountains, birds and waterfalls is reminiscent of that ghastly plastic bag scene in American Beauty. But what it is is memorable, in a way that is hard to intellectualise or explain. It is what it is: haunting, intimidating, beautiful, weird, funny, vaguely threatening in places – and, for me at least, really quite brilliant.
Survivor is at the Barbican until 14th January 2012.
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Image credit: Tom Medwell
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