LYON, France – One million euros cut from the budget. Big shows canceled. And an elaborate parade through the city – an event that had attracted around 250,000 people – was dramatically rethought. Despite these obstacles, the 19th Lyon Dance Biennale became France’s first summer festival on June 1, less than two weeks after the country relaxed its Covid-19-related rules – a bit.
“We still have reduced capacities, we still have a curfew at 9 p.m., we can still only eat and drink outside,” said Dominique Hervieu, director of the Biennale, one of the most important dance festivals in Europe. “But I was absolutely determined that if we even opened the festival would take place.” (Some of these restrictions are due to be relaxed on Wednesday; the biennale runs through June 16.)
Hervieu, who had to cancel the festival in September (when it normally happens), said it cut the duration and cut some of the more expensive and logistically complex programs. A priority is to keep a new project, “L’Expérience Fagor”: a dense compilation of free performances, workshops, dance classes and digital interactions in the 29,000 square meter Fagor factory, where washing machines were once made.
“People ask, ‘If you’ve lost money, why do something for free?'” Said Hervieu. (The Biennale budget was reduced from € 8 million to € 7 million or $ 8.5 million after sponsors withdrew and box office projections were dramatically reduced.) “But after Covid there are lessons about solidarity, about democratization art, about listening to young people at a time when society is in crisis. “
Most of the 32 companies in this year’s main program are based in Europe, but around 100 African artists took part – part of a nationwide program by the French Institute Africa 2020. Many came to take part in the parade, which this year had a theatrical format a street procession. Short plays inspired by Africa were presented by 12 groups to a limited audience over two days in the vast ancient theater of Fourvière, which dates back to 1 BC. (Roseyne Bachelot, the French Minister of Culture, sat on the stone seats in the opening lecture on Saturday afternoon).
The festival lost some premieres (including Angelin Preljocaj’s “Swan Lake”) to pandemic logistics, but gained more. Dimitris Papaioannous “Transverse Orientation” should have opened in the prestigious Cour d’Honneur at the Avignon Festival last year. Instead, its premiere, arguably the most important of the Biennale, took place in Lyon last week.
Papaioannou, who began his artistic life as a visual artist and worked with the director Robert Wilson, slowly gained international fame. “Lateral orientation” confirms that it is worthwhile.
Like all pieces by Papaioannou, it is a meticulously crafted, intensely visual experience. The set (by Tina Tzoka and Loukas Bakas) is a plain white wall, interrupted by a narrow door and an intermittently flickering, humming neon light. This provides a blank canvas for painterly lighting (by Stephanos Droussiotis) in a range of delicate colors on which eight performers create an ever-changing and often breathtaking palette of images and tableaus – reminiscent of visual arts, myths and religion.
A man lies naked on a terrifyingly realistic bull that the other actors seem to control; another man’s penis appears to have been torn off; compound male-female bodies are formed and dissolved. A naked woman (the blissful Breanna O’Mara) framed in a shell-like cocoon looks like the goddess of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” and shows a different kind of childbirth, while a slowly dripping bag is placed against hers Belly held, gradually deflated to reveal a newborn.
There is also humor in the large, wobbly figures that open up the work (later you do a little tap dance), in the assembled bodies, in the figures that are jostled by forces beyond their control. Occasionally the plot seems deliberately indistinct, like the tedious removal of the stage walls at the end, which expose a shallow lake that a man is trying to mop up – quite Pina Bausch. But “lateral orientation” with almost two hours is usually a long act of artistic magic that is created before our eyes by the extremely precise actors.
Precision is also a key element in Yuval Pick’s “Vocabulary of Need,” which is used for various recordings and revisions of Bach’s instructive “Partita No. 2 in D minor” by Max Bruckert. It’s ambitious to race any choreography against this score, and Pick – an Israel-born, Batsheva-trained choreographer and based in France – creates an eccentric, loosely tossed, hopping movement that at first doesn’t seem to make any attempt to match it. But gradually a visual complexity grows as the eight dancers rush unpredictably on and off the stage. With different ensemble groupings and solos (Bravo to Noémie De Almeida Ferreira and Julie Charbonnier), the piece slowly feels like a kinetic addition to the music – no small achievement.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the director of the Lyon Opera Ballet, Julie Guibert, decided to initiate a project; the creation of 30 solos for the 30 dancers of the company. Seven have already been seen and another five celebrated their premiere on Saturday in Les Subsistances, a cave-like cultural center on the banks of the Saône. (Despite cuts, this year biennial events will be held in 48 different theaters and 37 cities in the Lyon area, Hervieu said.)
The mood was rather gloomy. “Love”, a solo for Paul Vezin, by Marcos Morau, borrowed from circus and clown tropes, but took place in gloomy darkness. “La Venerina” by Nina Santes for Elsa Monguillot de Mirman was a boring mutant fantasy. The best pieces were Noé Soulier’s “Self Duet”, in which Katrien De Bakker tied herself into complex knots on her own body using ballet partnering techniques; Rachid Ouramdane’s “jours effaces” (“extinguished days”) for Léoannis Pupo-Guillen, a touching portrait of a man who seems to have lost touch with himself and the world; and Ioannis Mandafounis’ “Come and get your Antliz”, a happy festival of movement directed against the grain for the wonderful dancer Yan Leiva.
This biennial was not the densely layered, hectic event of the past few years. There was no hectic rush from one performance to the next, no post-performance conversations with artists, no chance for the many moderators and experts at the festival to network over a drink or meal. But the show went on. As Germaine Acogny, the grande dame of African dance, who performed her autobiographical solo “Somewhere at the Beginning” on Friday, wrote in the festival program: “Dare. Dream. To sing. To dance.”
Dance Biennale Lyon
Until June 16; labiennaledelyon.com.
