In Suffolk, 21 May 2013
By Doug Coombes
“I want…to tell…you a story…” says a recurring character in Freedom, the new work by the Jasmin Vardimon Company that ends its national tour at DanceEast in Ipswich.
Story? No: stories. And histories and fairy tales, dreams and nightmares, magic and madness, peace and love, war and hate. And John and Yoko. They all play their part in this exploration of freedom and its’ enemies, especially fear. It is a dazzling and dynamic piece of contemporary dance which is also entirely accessible to a general audience.
Freedom is made up of a series of overlapping and occasionally connected vignettes on the concept of freedom and the restrictions, external and internal, that limit and bind us. It opens to the sound of birdsong and the natural freedom of rivers and forests, the ocean and the mountain is ever-present. But for the humans who pass through these landscapes nature can be as threatening as it is liberating and Freedom never stops asking how real freedom can ever be found, or if it even exists. The dancers are always reaching for the skies, only to find gravity pulling them back to earth.
There are so many ideas, scenarios and characters on the loose that in less skilled hands the result could have been overactive or even incoherent but Vardimon’s dancers never lose their focus on Freedom’s central theme. The dancing is of the highest quality and underpins every stage of the work. Only outstanding dancers can make such demanding movement look so fluid and unforced.
There are several images in Freedom that will live in the memory. The set and media design (by Vardimon and her Associate Director Guy Bar-Amotz) contributed to some of these but the most striking visual moments were actually the simplest ones with the dancers alone or in pairs. Perhaps this is when they felt most able to interpret what the idea of freedom meant to them.
No review of Freedom can fail to point out how funny the work often is. Those who are intimidated by the supposed obscurities of contemporary dance have nothing to fear from the wonderful scenes involving surfboards, geckos or balloons and the great silent film comedians would have been proud of any of these. Dictators always loathe laughter and Freedom fully understands its’ essential place as a counter to fear and repression.
Vardimon and Bar-Amotz developed Freedom with the six international dancers who perform the piece – Luke Burrough, Kai-Wen Chuang, Estéban Fourmi, David Lloyd, Aoi Nakamura and Júlia Robert Parés. The dancers’ creative attachment to the work is clear and the unity of Vardimon’s choreography is matched by their shared commitment and mutual respect.
Freedom uses two iconic pieces of popular music, Over the Rainbow and Imagine. Both songs are full of the promise of eternal happiness and freedom, but just out of reach. Jasmin Vardimon and her company have created a work that also embodies this impossible dream and does so with humanity, humour, imagination and sensitivity. It is altogether exceptional.
Oxford Dance Writers, 16 March 2013
By Eleanor Jones
Freedom is in many ways an idea that can only really ever be expressed fully by dance – the sheer abandon of movement without restriction or concern for social protocols. In taking the concept of freedom as their inspiration, the Jasmin Vardimon Company bravely dived into a bottomless pit of human feeling, for what is more endless, and more important to the human soul than freedom? It is one of these things, much like control, that are only defined by their absence or felt in moments of restriction. Yet we spend a good deal of our time ignoring it, existing in the grey area between, plastering smiles upon our frustrated faces.
In Freedom Jasmin Vardimon’s choreography plays with this concept – this tug of war between the two extremes of emotional captivity and release. The choreography uses the pull and push of wave like motions to capture the fragility of freedom. The wave motif continues throughout the performance – sometimes a joyous expression of physical and emotional freedom and sometimes a desperate beating against the boundaries of perpetual inhibition or restraint.
The performers interact with each other in an intimate, and often playful, manner. In one light hearted sequence dancer Esteban Fourmi handled his partner, Julia Robert Pares, as a surf board – she endlessly grinning as they surfed towards freedom. Yet in another, more intense, moment a dancer balanced, crab-like, upon her partner’s thighs as she performed an eerie, almost ritualistic dance as he both supported and restrained her. The size of the cast is perfectly judged, allowing for these intimate duets and for larger pieces of rhythmic movement in unison.
The set was particularly fluid – a fine example of this is the opening sequence. A single performer enters the stage and begins to climb what appears to be a rock formation in forest clearing. As the dancer climbs higher it is evident that the rock is of human form – the rest of the performers move under netting to fit her form as she climbs, raising and lowering her. What at first appears to be a tangle of forest foliage is revealed to be a mass of industrial tubing by the intelligent lighting design. This deceptive quality allows for a scene to instantly manoeuvre from tranquillity and liberty to impotence and restraint.
What really got me excited about this production was the use of animation, which both interacts with the performers and constitutes a performance on its own merit. Threatening birds made of light and shadow dive at the dancers, repeatedly attacking in cresting waves. This vignette is so vivid and menacing it is practically cinematic. Interaction with the animations is also used in a comic and endearing manner, as when dancer Luke Burrough reacts to an animated lizard crawling about his torso. Puppet animation is also exercised, and the changing forms this accommodates allows for the story of a beautiful young mermaid and a rabbit to gradually develop from an enchanting forest tale to a darkly sinister one.
The mish-mash of styles, tone and media in Freedom made it a dynamic and rather thrilling performance. There is a distinct lack of pretension in the production, the performance maintains a simplicity despite the ingenious set. This simplicity is found in the shared human experience of freedom – both the greatest joy and the worst misery.
Oxford Dance Writers, 12 March 2013
By Dana Mills
Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains?
What does it mean to be free? Since the days of Plato until post-modernism thinkers and activists have offered competing interpretations of the concept of freedom. In a wonderfully turbulent sequence of lyrical scenes of movement Jasmin Vardimon shows how dance theatre can illuminate further the complexity of one of the most fundamental concepts in politics.
The power of this piece lies in the combination of movement that draws the spectator into the performers’ physicality; mesmerising sets that change with the mood and the energy of the piece, and allow the performers to enact their fantasies in a giant playground; a varied musical score that enables the shift from one definition of the concept of freedom to another; and a delicate presence of a non-narrative that combines all of the above into a coherent whole which does not require us, as spectators, to sign up to one definition of freedom but rather enables us to enjoy the complete spectrum of interpretations.
Freedom commences with a performer standing on what seems like a giant rock covered in green. We see the rock moving and wonder whether freedom comes from within the performer who is moving upon the rock or from the moving rock itself. From there onwards we are presented with a series of fantastic images: a man surfing on the back of the “sea”, one of the other performers; hungry like, howling performers threatening another performer; a dancer on pointe shoes moving across the stage to the sound of “somewhere over the rainbow” and grabbing the wondrous set; a man blowing up balloons, only for those to be popped by a woman elegantly smoking a cigarette. All those scenes involve highly theatrical repeating motifs which entice us to momentarily become one with the scene, only to lose ourselves again in another. The set deserves a special mentioning: a jungle like combination of plastic pipes and green camouflage backdrop which rotates in varying speeds and simultaneously reflects and challenges the action taking place on stage. Restrictions for freedom, Vardimon tells us, are not to be found in the physical constraints of our environments; they come from within, from the way we perceive those constraints and consequently act upon them. The movement language is reflective and fierce, shifting the dancers from throwing themselves forcefully upon the ground to seconds later indulging in a melting like quality, limbs reaching out and showing the seemingly never ending ability of the body to go beyond itself.
Throughout the piece I felt that its real strength lies in Vardimon’s ability to capture the complexity and subtlety of inter-human relationships. That being that has been the beast, scaring us and forcing us to retreat into ourselves, can seconds later become gentle and tender, encouraging us to explore the potential for freedom in our human interactions. Vardimon shows us that freedom – or lack of it – is never a one dimensional relationship between one being and another; throughout the piece she peels off the different layers of the concept to show us that no conception of freedom is ever as simple may first appear. Man may be born free, but his chains are never just what they seem to be.
Nottingham Evening Post, 5 March 2013
By Sarah Gill
BIRD song and dancing fireflies in a luxuriant forest is the setting for the solo performer who steps into award-winning choreographer Jasmin Vardimon’s world of Freedom.
One theme is the elusiveness of freedom, illustrated with a variety of scenes: lovers throw themselves together but are lured apart, a surfer rides the waves with a woman as a human surfboard; a ballerina hooks herself up to industrial tubing to forge wings but fails to take flight.
The theme of oppression is depicted by women, shackled by men. In another scene, a man’s dreams are punctured by his lover, who puts her lit cigarette to each of his party balloons.
There is also a nightmarish threat of ravenous hunting dogs and a dark shadow, creating a terrific energy on stage.
This fast paced physical performance is eloquent and thought-provoking, set to an entertaining sound score, from Led Zeppelin and John Lennon, to ambient electronica and nature sounds.
When the six strong cast move together, their technical ability is flawless and they respond well to Vardimon’s low-angled, floor-based choreography.
The Oxford Times, 27 Feb 2013
By David Bellan
Jasmin Vardimon talks about Freedom heading for Oxford Playhouse
Jasmin Vardimon has been in this country since she founded her company in 1997. They have appeared several times in Oxfordshire over the past few years, during which time her work has proved to be grippingly spiky, with powerful themes unflinchingly, dramatically put over: urban misery in Park, the holocaust in 7734, and a sort of ‘whodunnit’ in Justitia. Her new piece, Freedom was premiered at Sadlers Wells at the end of last year. I asked her what aspects of freedom she has explored.
“My new work explores what freedom actually means to us as a concept and as a reality. During the research period, I found, for most of us, freedom is defined by what it is actually not. We looked at restrictions and ties in current behaviours and also in history. “And also things we are aware of that got into our existence and that we can never let go of because they are part of who we are. So we are looking at what’s been done before us, where are we coming from, where are our roots. For example, my piece 7734 is based on part of my history, the Holocaust. It’s something I can’t let go of, something that happened to my parents and grandparents that will always be there, something that I can’t get free from. So there are different sorts of freedom that we explored, freedoms that can be restricted in various ways. For instance we’re not free to fly, because of gravity.”
Freedom is a vast subject, and I wondered how Vardimon had been able to marshal her ideas into a dance-work to be performed on the stage.
“Well, you know my work. You know I like to work with different elements, so it’s not just movement; there is a lot of theatricality, and visual elements I’m using to convey a story, from video animation to other layers of information that form part of the whole production. I am actually trying to tell a story. How do you tell a story, what are the restrictions to that? So all that is in the piece as well. There is more conceptual exploration of what freedom means.”
All this sounds a bit intellectualised, but I can vouch that Vardimon’s work is always fascinating and gripping to watch. However, I wondered whether what we will see is a series of unconnected episodes, or a coherent flow of ideas.
“One might see it as a series of episodes, but they are interlinked. I don’t want to say too much in advance, but, for example, when you read a book, some will just see the simple story, some will read the references between the lines and would find other connections. “I think it’s the same with any art, and with my work there are always a lot of references I use, from history, from ecology, from psychotherapy. So, if you see those links, you can make the links. I guess every audience member will read the work in a different way. “That’s what excites me — how many different interpretations can there be?”
This particular work is performed by just six of Jasmin Vardimon’s dancers, and there are animated performers as well. In her work you are always aware of a tightly connected and usually quite disparate group of performers, and as usual they have contributed a lot to the finished product.
“My dancers contribute a huge amount. The whole process requires involvement in research into what each aspect means to them, interpreting and responding. The way I work is task-orientated, so there are a lot of tasks I give them. They bring something and then I take what they bring and throw it back at them in a different way. It’s a long process that goes backwards and forwards.”
As in nearly all dance, music is of great importance, and in Freedom, Vardimon’s choices have been quite eclectic.
“As in most of my work, the music comes in very late when I’m creating a piece, almost like in films, and I use it to create a certain atmosphere or a certain effect."
Dance Hub Magazine, 30 Nov 2012
By Charlotte Constable
4 STARS
Freedom of speech, freedom of youth, freedom to explore, free love. Jasmin Vardimon always makes her work into a collage of every fibre of its theme. She not only plays with possibility, but pushes the boundaries – of her performers, of design, and of her audience.
As the dim yellow lights barely illuminate the stage, I find that the set (a collaborative effort of Vardimon and Guy Bar-Amotz) captivates me immediately. With childlike wonder I drink in its jungle of hanging white tubes, green cables and knotted paper, and what appears to be an ivy-covered boat downstage. Júlia Robert Parés enters – her delight at finding herself there rivalling the excitement in my eyes – and she climbs the ‘boat’, which begins to wobble and respond to her stepping and tumbling. Before long it has melted to the ground, and the dancers which once created its form are revealed, slithering into the undergrowth and dragging Robert Parés with them.
At first, ‘freedom’ is explored in its most obvious interpretation – dancers yell excitedly, leaping and tumbling in that physically gruelling, repetitive floor-based unison work which Vardimon does so well. There is ‘free love’ as a couple gaze at one another, running in circles interrupted with passionate leaps into each other’s arms.
But of course, as with so much of Vardimon’s work, the mood quickly turns bittersweet as we see the male partner of the couple (Estéban Fourmi, perhaps the standout of the night) use the female as a surfboard, her unmoving smile seemingly hiding gritted teeth. It is hugely entertaining, and one of those simple yet inventive uses of the body which leave me questioning why I have never seen them before. The biggest laughs come when he props her up straight and thoughtlessly chucks his towel over her head, to which she remains stock still. But this is undoubtedly a feminist comment, which Vardimon’s work is rarely short of.
Another mark of her work is highly advanced creativity in technology and design, and Freedom replicates one of the projection-interaction concepts used in 2003’s Lullaby, a fluorescent lizard appearing to crawl across one performer’s body, under his clothes and into his mouth. This time Vardimon also offers a fresh take on shadow puppets, interrupting the movement with a narrated myth about an entrapped mermaid who tried to swim free of the sea.
I wait for the majority of the work to see something truly unnerving, Pina-Bausch style – and I am not disappointed. As Kai-Wen Chuang bourrées across the stage in her tutu and pointe shoes to Hawaiian Rainbow Singers’ version of Over the Rainbow, we are charmed into false pretence. She sashays with two of the dangling tubes on the set, rippling them like the wings of the swan she dreams of representing, only to become a screaming mess as she realises her limits – and just as the vocalist happily belts out, ‘why can’t I?’ A very intelligent meeting of references – and very difficult viewing. Darker still, we later see Fourmi scrambling and crying desperately for Robert Parés, but remaining mere feet away, entrapped in green cords. The final moments re-enact the illusory opening with the human ‘boat’, but instead, as Robert Parés stretches out her arms in a totally ‘free’ expansion, she tumbles off the back, met by gasps in the audience.
Vardimon has a very clear signature style: a scrapbook of powerful images in Vaudeville format, depicting endlessly creative interpretations on politically or socially-charged themes. Her works are performed to full houses, and attract the sorts of audiences seen at theatrical shows. But the most exciting direction she could now take would be to break free of her own conventions.
BRIGHTON MAGAZINE, 1 Dec 2012
By Howard Young
'Freedom' Expressed Through Dance Was A Puzzling Joy @ Brighton Dome
To my wife the big white pipes looked like Elephant Tubing used for the passing of humidified oxygen to patients, and smaller green ones like standard oxygen tubing. To me they looked like the pipe that goes out of the window from my mum's tumble dryer and my dads hosepipe, hung on huge revolving driers of the kind you often get in small gardens.
What they transformed into, during the course of Jasmin Vardimon’s 'Freedom' (Brighton Dome Concert Hall), was a kind of weird techno-spaghetti jungle; a place to hide, a place to lurk, a place to watch from, a place to spring from and place to retreat to. I loathed it and yet was profoundly intrigued by it.
It is amazing how the music and the movement of men and women can transform something slightly preposterous into a fitting backdrop for fun and horror.
For “Freedom” is a world of humour and terror, but more than that, it is a place where they are the different sides of the same coin. And that is why it works so well.
A man uses a girl as a surfboard to performing tricks on as she grins beneath him. Funny? Well, yes it is funny to watch, but on the other hand he is getting his kicks, his sense of freedom from using someone as an object? I think so.
The programme notes ask:
“What does it men to be free? To what extent are we as a society trapped into our desire to attain freedom? When does the search for freedom transform into an oppressive condition, in and of itself? Jasmin Vardimon examines the ironic relationship between the concepts of freedom and constraint within her latest piece of work.”
I would add to that there is always a cost to freedom, and many countries, our own included, often ask other people to bear the brunt of that cost, either through proxy warfare, dictatorships that suit the free countries to maintain, or through appalling wages that subsidise the freedom of the western bourgeois to shop freely and cheaply.
There is no more telling an image that of a lone ballerina, as swan of sorts, turning two of those white pipes into wings of sort and then screaming out in mental agony, as she is unable to fly.
She is not free to do whatever she likes and this destroys her. In words this sounds ridiculous but on stage it was magnificent and terrible at once.
This is why it is a tale told in dance, some stories were never meant for words.
The opening and closing sense transform the set into a jungle where light is fleeting and sparse in form of gentle fireflies.
Later, in the full light, great screaming shadows shriek across the stage in an evil mockery of these scenes.
Same coin, two sides, again.
A woman seems to enjoy enticing her man, writhing in a kind of mock bondage of pipes for him, and yet this all seems to lead to much more darker adventures where control is lost for real.
Superb top quality work from the entire dance company and some thoughtful and intelligent choreography from Vardimon have created something well worth seeing but very hard to describe.
The answer then, is to go and see it for yourself, off you go then.
The Argus, 19 Nov 2012
Interview with Jasmin Vardimon by Nione Meakin
With freedom comes great responsibility
Jasmin Vardimon is one of the dance world’s brightest lights, a “bold and fearless” choreographer whose work robustly dissects tricky topics such as sickness, justice and the Holocaust.
Born on a kibbutz in Israel, she did two years of compulsory military service, started Open University studies in anthropology and psychology then dropped out to pursue her passion for dance. In 1997 she formed her own company.
I’d expected a certain toughness to her but it’s a girlish voice that answers the phone, her English charmingly accented. She apologises for missing my call earlier – it’s half-term and she’s taken a break from her current tour to head home to London and spend time with her seven-year-old daughter Mayam.
Motherhood is proving something of a balancing act for the fiercely driven artist and she no longer dances as much as she did.
“I miss it a lot,” she admits. “But after I became a mum I realised I couldn’t be the artistic director of my company and a dancer and the sort of mum I wanted to be – I’d have to let go of one of the things.
“To be a good dancer – or anything else for that matter – you have to devote yourself to it.”
She’s clearly besotted with Mayam, a name she and her husband Guy Bar-Amotz (associate director of the Jasmin Vardimon Company) made up.
“It’s a palindrome both in English and Hebrew and it means sea water. Sea water comes and goes and a palindrome works both ways too.”
Her daughter has added an extra dimension to her work she says.
“I’m very inspired by her. Children have this amazing capacity to be fresh and innovative and it’s amazing to observe and learn from.”
By way of example, she explains how a segment of the company’s current show Freedom was copied from a video of Mayam dancing in their sitting room at home.
“I haven’t sent her to study dance – yet! – because I really enjoy seeing how she moves with no restriction. If you send kids to learn techniques too early it almost kills their creativity and openness towards movement.”
The uninhibited movements of a child are one of the many interpretations of the show’s title.
“I wanted to explore the concept of freedom and what it means to be free. We face many ties and restrictions in the conventions of religion, civilisation, respect, politeness, responsibility – whenever you try, you cannot really let go.
“Even on a physical level, gravity keeps us in place. We found that freedom came to be defined by what it is not.”
Her last piece 7734 addressed the legacy of the Holocaust and man’s boundless capacity both to inflict and withstand brutality.
“I do have an inclination to look at the dark side in my work. I think theatre and cinema and literature are the best places to explore the disturbing things in life because you’re in a safe place and can allow yourself to go to these places.
“But I find from every darkness there is a beauty and positivity that grew out of it.”
Freedom examines the flipside of oppression, what we must do to be free.
“There was an interesting sentence I remember for many years and happened to speak to my daughter about recently. At school in Israel, my teacher would write on the board ‘freedom = responsibility’ and it’s only with time I came to understand it and have learnt to believe it.
“Growing up in kibbutz we were away from parents and adults and on our own for most of the day. We had to take responsibility for our actions, had to get ourselves ready for school, get there ourselves. Freedom meant responsibility for our days.”
Vardimon believes the kibbutz strongly shaped the person she has become. Her husband also grew up on one and she says, “Your experience of life is very different to others. We talk about it a lot. Community living involves a lot of freedom but you have to become individual and learn to be responsible to yourself and others.
“As a child I was very independent from a young age. I liked to do things my way and explore and experience things myself.”
Did she feel driven to be successful? “I felt – I feel – driven to be honest,” she says. “It’s more important for me to be honest than popular and that’s the motto I have in my head whenever I’m making work.
“It’s not that I actively don’t want to be popular but I want to share what’s on my mind more. I am very organised and I have a fantastic team that works with me – I think they are responsible for the success we’ve had.
“Team work is crucial and that’s something I learnt on the kibbutz as well – you all contribute skills for the group success.”
She admits dance was an obsession however, enough to make her give up her studies.
“I still regret that. I’m thinking of going back to university actually, it’s been on my mind a lot. But it’s just how life became. I came to be much busier than I thought I’d be while studying and I slowly started missing lectures. I was in the Open University so it was quite easy!”
She formed her own company in an attempt to create meaning in her work. “I danced in other companies for seven or eight years and it got to the stage where I just kept asking the choreographer why I was doing something, what it meant, so that I didn’t just feel I was a body performing on stage.
“I realised if I wanted that experience, I’d have to create it for myself. I felt I had a lot of things to say and slowly it evolved into a company.”
Vardimon is not one to do anything thoughtlessly. Every element of her work is chosen to convey meaning. The music alone can take months of agonising.
“I don’t use music until the very end because it’s so strong and influential I know how it can affect us. I use it more as it’s used in film to enhance an atmosphere or heighten a feeling.”
No wonder then that it infuriates her when reviewers focus only on the physical movement of the performers. Didn’t she once claim dance critics were the greatest threat to the arts today?
“Aaaah!” she groans. “Everyone remembers this! I try not to read the reviews now because there are Phds written about my work and more intellectual writing and I’m very interested to read that. I’m sure dance critics can do that too but with the space they have in the paper it tends to be a description of the piece and whether they liked it or not.
“As an artist, you invest so much in reference, meaning and layers of information – every little detail is carefully thought out. How can someone just describe it as a visual thing?”
South Wales Argus, 21 Nov 2012
By Andy Howells
Newport Riverfront’s dance week got off to a fabulous start with a return visit of the Jasmin Vardimon Company’s latest production Freedom.
Vardimon’s work is usually known for pushing boundaries and Freedom lives up to its title by exploring new areas in dance combined with comedy, drama, mime, sound design and video animation.
Exploring notions of what keeps our imagination free by using the backdrop of the sea, the six performers Luke Burrough, Kai-Wen Chuang, Esteban Fourmi, David Lloyd, Aoi Nakamura and Julia Robert combine flowing dance routines with dramatic action sequences. A broad pool of dance styles were drawn upon from modern to ballet and all blended seamlessly.
This allows the audience to go on a journey that tells stories within stories whilst making subtle observations on history, fairy tales and all too familiar topics including slavery and imprisonment.
The real groundbreaker of this show are the animation sequences, particularly when a green lizard appears to dance on one of the performers and another scene when the dancers are dramatically chased across the stage by a shadowy winged predator. While the performers utilised shadow and light to its fullest potential, sound design fused familiar classical and pop pieces with the weird and the wonderful including a nod to sound designs own innovators John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
Breathtaking, mesmerising and frequently thought provoking Freedom is a must-see show and represents Jasmin Vardimon at her creative best.
Londondance.com, 14 Nov 2012
By Gail Schock
Bird song, fireflies and a luxuriant forest embrace the solo performer who first steps into Jasmin Vardimon’s world of FREEDOM . Gently she explores her blossoming surroundings, green, welcoming, dreamlike and pure; this forest is initially one that sets a warm and comfortable scene for the lone performer. As the forest leaves stroke her, softly drawing her deeper into its fertile, flourishing depths, it soon becomes apparent that she isn’t alone; five others make up the inhabitants of this tale and her independence may not always be as luxurious as first thought.
Vardimon’s eleventh work presents a complex variety of scenes, delving into the meaning of ‘freedom’ as a choreographer, performer, dreamer, individual, or pack. Vardimon uses light and shade, dramatic shifts in music, shadow puppetry, dance theatre and intricate physical performance . Music pulses through the show – Led Zeppelin, Ben Frost and Alejandro Jodorowsky are mixed with Hugh Dillon, Yuko Nexus6 and Hawian Rainbow Singers.
Vardimon’s technique is unmistakable; the movement is open, fluid with detailed lifts and sharp floor work, spiralling through the core, out and beyond the end of the dancers’ bodies. If you have seen her previous works you will recognise the starting place of the choreography – the way the performers arms stretch open to reveal a strength which propels them up through the air into one another’s arms and across the floor, lapping the stage like waves, stroking and seeking, all pulled by a magnetic force to twist, coil and weave.
Her performers show dedicated commitment to every section of the piece. Ups and downs, tensions, stories and ever changing relationships are embedded into the choreography. Vardimon takes the pedestrian and magnifies it to showcase the cast of six performers in sublime technicolor. Lovers throw themselves together or are held bereft from one another as the forest lures them apart, trios of human/dog hybrids send chills through the audience and when the full cast move together their performance is flawless – covering space at a breathtaking pace. The set, created by Guy Bar-Amotz with Vardimon, is an additional character in its own right. Trees made out of multifarious plastic tubing, including garden hose and tumble dryer vent,s hang, twirl and spin throughout the show. Dancers spring through, over and under the forest, at times caringly held by it, at others squeezed, stretched and ripped into darkness; pulled away from loved ones, hunted by the dark and reminded that even when together we may not want the same sense of freedom. Vardimon seems to toy with a sense of a shared intelligence alongside complex social identifiers, liberty, independence, self-determination and free will. When one or all are lost, it is a savage land that rips the relationships between the performers apart. There are lighter edges to this story though, a curious mermaid, a ballerina seeking the ultimate extension in her limbs and John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s peace ‘bed in’ all feature.
Vardimon’s ability to ask deep questions about societies intentions and motivations is woven clearly throughout FREEDOM . She invites you to question whether you and she share the same idea of ‘freedom’ or, if it is utterly different, then what does freedom mean for you?
Bachtrack, 15 Nov 2012
By Erin Johnson
4 STARS
In what way would you set the stage for an exploration of freedom? Jasmin Vardimon’s vision adorns the Sadler’s Wells stage with large, spinning set pieces dripping with duct tube and green vines of industrial plastic. A camouflaged blanket made of rustling synthetic leaves makes sporadic entrances and exits to the scene. With a title like Freedom, you can’t help but anticipate a sort of happy-go-lucky traipse through the set pieces, lots of smiling, and a few peace signs. And while there was a section of ecstatic, open-armed running, and quite a few smiling faces, there was a lot of imagery that I didn’t expect – but still appreciated, as an honest exploration of an enigmatic concept.
Vardimon explained in a post-show discussion that she found freedom was best defined by what it wasn’t, and this came across in the variety of events that fell along the freedom spectrum. A woman begs to be bound by her male partner, offering her wrists and dancing a sultry duet. A puppet show with a morose ending tells the tale of a curious mermaid, trapped by her own naïveté. Two lovers go from displaying the freedom of loving each other, to the cramped aggression of soured affections. With intricate sets and props, Vardimon and her dance artists weave a patchwork of witty tableaux and extended, distorted storylines that seem to balance and complete each other, prodding at the corners of the idea of freedom, and showing us that being free isn’t as simple as it seems.
On a movement level, the dancing in Freedom was in line with Jasmin Vardimon Company’s typical physicality and athleticism. Dancers flew through the air into expertly landed rolls, and moved in and out of the floor with speed and agility. The group sections had a dynamic, almost tribal energy, while the duet and solo material was well varied, from slinky floorwork solos to the surprising appearance of pointe shoes. Freedom keeps you engaged from start to finish.
However, the drawback to this variety is that you never quite felt like each mini-plot had a conclusion. It was like flipping through channels of a television, the stories faded in and out despite any attachment you might have had to the characters. It was very Pina Bausch, to be honest, complete with a strong underlying commentary on the objectification of women. Still, it was interesting to see the movement style of Vardimon coupled with the collage-like Bausch structure, and I believe it was an effective pairing to explore the concept of freedom.
Overall Vardimon and her dancers presented a work that was playful yet meaningful, and the performance kept you interested with a sprinkling of cultural references and creative quirks. While not revolutionary, Freedom did delve into the many dimensions of freedom, and it was a highly entertaining and visual evening.
THE LONDONIST, 13 Nov 2012
By Belinda Liversedge
Freedooom!!! Shouts Mel Gibson in Braveheart and although the concept could suggest this new production by revered Jasmin Vardimon Company is cliché it really is not. Vardimon tells us the inspiration for Freedom is interest in how freedom is always moments away from its polar opposite, imprisonment, and that we only know how to be free really when we’ve experienced the bad.
The six strong dance troupe illustrate this through entrancing tableaux. A sweet giggly Japanese doll like dancer giggles onto the stage. “I am would like to tell a story about…” but she cannot finish the sentence and her inexpression descends into scary robotic compulsions.
Staging suggests at times, flowing deep-sea fronds and a magical twinkly light underworld, at others the ugly signs of industry, driving dancers mad as they scream and tumble on stage. Standout moments of this fast-paced, high energy production are many but for us there is one sublime one that caps all. This was the ballerina, trying to fly on the industrial tubing she at first believes are wings. To the sound of “somewhere over the rainbow,” her exuberance descends into frustration. “Why can’t I” went the refrain and the roof of Sadler’s resounded with heartfelt applause.
There are many more though: a sado masochistic mermaid, a geisha girl, a dancer whose hands recreate the lyrical poetry of seaweed in movement and a surfer who uses his girlfriend as his board.
Set to an invigorating sound score, with Led Zeppelin, John Lennon, ambient electronica, kitsch and nature sounds racketing the pace along, it’s worth battling down the doors of the venue to nab a ticket for tonight’s last night at Sadlers.
Dance & Drama, Highland Showcase, 4 November 2012
By Jennie Macfie
Empire Theatre, Eden Court, Inverness
FIREFLIES in the rainforest, water flowing, birdsong, and a girl (Júlia Robert Parés) sleeping on the leaf-strewn floor; the Jasmin Vardimon Company’s Freedom opens in an idylllic scene, an organic garden of Eden.
THE GIRL wakes, climbs to the top of a hillock and opens her arms to the sky, a classic picture of joie de vivre. However, this being a meditation by Jasmin Vardimon, nothing is quite as it seems; the hillock is alive and the sound of music – in this case, Led Zeppelin’s frenetic ‘Immigrant Song’ – suddenly overwhelms the birdsong, the lights come on and the rainforest turns out to be plastic tubing... and the dancers rush across the stage in a delirious wave of exuberance. Fractal repetitions of a punishing movement, whirling onto the knees and off again continues beyond what most of us would expect to be the boundary of endurance. No wonder they are all knee-padded up as this movement is the work’s motif, cropping up again and again and linking the apparently unconnected episodes of Freedom, as the eclectic soundtrack veers all the way round the musical compass from Orbison to Ono.
“I want to tell you a story” says a dancer. Gradually, one possible narrative journey becomes visible, a woman’s emotional life from Eve-like birth to white-haired (created imaginatively with shaving foam) age and death, with a Pina Bausch-like exploration of gender politics. Can men and women be in a relationship and retain their freedom? Esteban Fourmi used Pares as a surfboard in a sequence which was comic and cutting at the same time, and almost incidentally was also an inventive, imaginative, neatly executed piece of dance.
Other standout sequences include a screaming tutu’d swan, dancers shredding tights with their teeth and an artful lizard. Less successful was a slightly incongruous shadow puppet storytelling. But overall, Freedom was another example of the way Vardimon and her dancers – a formidable crew with a stunning portfolio of stamina, energy, passion and intelligence – are creating works which are among the most intelligent and impressive in the UK today.
Salford Online, 18 October 2012
By Peter Jacobs
4.5 STARS
Jasmin Vardimon is a British-based Israeli-born choreographer who founded her company in the UK in 1997. An Associate Artist at Sadler’s Wells, Vardimon has created more than ten shows for her fiercely imagined company that demonstrate a desire to create innovative dance theatre with huge imagination, physicality and breadth of vision; exploring ideas about politics, relationships, society and the worlds we inhabit. Freedom is her most recent show and marks a long overdue return to the Lowry – their first since 2008.
The show explores ideas of freedom and what that actually means to us as a concept and as a reality. Freedom has a non-linear narrative with a series of interlinking characters and situations that progressively lead the audience through various scenes and realisations back to the starting point, which, seen again with the knowledge of the journey taken seems familiar but disconcertingly strange. Watching the show one realises how much freedom depends on the permission of others, how freedom is something that we create or take for ourselves but that can be taken from us with alarming ease, by others and ourselves. There is the idea that true freedom means a freedom from fear, whether that means the freedom to be ourselves or the freedom to exist without threat or danger – remembering that fear is a key element of our self-protection.
The show opens with a genuine sense of dark and magical wonder but progressively explores different kinds of darkness, illuminated with touches of humour and magic, and moments of huge exuberance and joy, all delivered with complete conviction and physical fearlessness by the six performers. Different ways in which people express and experience freedom are offset by images of captivity, control, restraint – even when that is a pleasurable thing. The set design by Guy Bar-Amotz is a fantastical and versatile jungle of wires, netting and plastic tubing that, with the nocturnal and magical lighting by Chahine Yavroyan, creates a literal jungle – a place of freedom and joy and exploration and hidden dangers; somewhere to run free but somewhere that can entrap and entangle – essentially a huge whirling metaphor.
Alongside the physical performance, the show features an eccentric and diverse soundtrack – Led Zeppelin, John Lennon and Roy Orbison, ambient electronica, kitsch, nature sounds and more (sound and movement designed by Vardimon herself) – playful digital animation (by Jesse Collett), text and puppetry, and even a spot of classical ballet. The choreography, created with the cast, is either highly physical, the group blurring the boundaries of their imaginary landscape and sometimes challenging each other with extraordinary almost recklessness, or incredibly detailed either in gesture or animalistic sinuousness – strange and beautiful. Luke Burrough, Kai-Wen Chuang, Esteban Fourmi, David Lloyd, Aoi Nakamura and Julia Robert Pares are striking individual performers and wonderful as a group, conveying a vast array of emotions and ideas through wonder, joy, exuberance, playfulness and passion and desire via cruelty, possession, control, madness and rage. All six are outstanding, demonstrating an impressive array of skills, strength and emotional connectedness and freedom – there’s that word again.
Freedom is not a simple show. You sometimes wonder where it is leading you but it is hugely watchable, impressively performed, beautifully staged, occasionally baffling, and at times thrilling and cinematic, at others dark and intimate. It’s the kind of show that is challenging, puzzling, revealing, strange, and leaves you with questions and thoughts to disentangle at the end. And that’s a good thing. That’s a kind of freedom.
ITCHY Manchester, 18 October 2012
By Rosa Meekums
This new production from critically acclaimed dance theatre group Jasmin Vardimon, Freedom, fuses the disciplines of dance, theatre, storytelling, comedy and even shadow puppetry in a beguiling, mind-boggling mesh of narrative strands about the joys, and perils, of freedom. There is nothing traditional, or for that matter predictable in this show, and will therefore delight avant-garde afficionados but confound those looking for comprehensive storylines, or unadulterated dance.
The set is striking and commands attention with some twenty-plus feet of what look like malleable slinkies, plastic ropes, camouflage netting, and other indeterminate tendril-like features, all set on a mobile hanging from the rafters which at times rotates, and nearly always participates in the performance as props, dancing aids, and background scenery. Itchy was enraptured from the first second.
The movement is athletic, springy and dynamic. The dancers perform with vigour, expert control and breathtaking flexibility. The choreography allows for a blend of group, duos and solo dance giving each performer a chance to display their unique way of moving.
The theme of freedom is explored in its paradoxical entirety. What happens when you don't have enough freedom? What happens when you do? Once you have had freedom, can you cope when it is taken away? Characters take it in turns to free and enslave each other as the disjointed narrative comments on the ways in which we can be free, and also how freedom eludes us. There are moments of bleak nightmarish stuff in Freedom, contrasted by unexpected, but welcome bursts of physical comedy and innocent joy.
This show is for thinkers. We seriously got our thinking cap on. This production is not recommended unless you are prepared to engage, analyse and be in thrall to fantastical dreamscapes. Edging closer to total theatre than dance theatre (the only thing missing is singing), this production will lure you in to its dark, humorous, joyful, sensual, and surreal world.
Salford Online, 18 October 2012
By Peter Jacobs
4.5 STARS
Jasmin Vardimon is a British-based Israeli-born choreographer who founded her company in the UK in 1997. An Associate Artist at Sadler’s Wells, Vardimon has created more than ten shows for her fiercely imagined company that demonstrate a desire to create innovative dance theatre with huge imagination, physicality and breadth of vision; exploring ideas about politics, relationships, society and the worlds we inhabit. Freedom is her most recent show and marks a long overdue return to the Lowry – their first since 2008.
The show explores ideas of freedom and what that actually means to us as a concept and as a reality. Freedom has a non-linear narrative with a series of interlinking characters and situations that progressively lead the audience through various scenes and realisations back to the starting point, which, seen again with the knowledge of the journey taken seems familiar but disconcertingly strange. Watching the show one realises how much freedom depends on the permission of others, how freedom is something that we create or take for ourselves but that can be taken from us with alarming ease, by others and ourselves. There is the idea that true freedom means a freedom from fear, whether that means the freedom to be ourselves or the freedom to exist without threat or danger – remembering that fear is a key element of our self-protection.
The show opens with a genuine sense of dark and magical wonder but progressively explores different kinds of darkness, illuminated with touches of humour and magic, and moments of huge exuberance and joy, all delivered with complete conviction and physical fearlessness by the six performers. Different ways in which people express and experience freedom are offset by images of captivity, control, restraint – even when that is a pleasurable thing. The set design by Guy Bar-Amotz is a fantastical and versatile jungle of wires, netting and plastic tubing that, with the nocturnal and magical lighting by Chahine Yavroyan, creates a literal jungle – a place of freedom and joy and exploration and hidden dangers; somewhere to run free but somewhere that can entrap and entangle – essentially a huge whirling metaphor.
Alongside the physical performance, the show features an eccentric and diverse soundtrack – Led Zeppelin, John Lennon and Roy Orbison, ambient electronica, kitsch, nature sounds and more (sound and movement designed by Vardimon herself) – playful digital animation (by Jesse Collett), text and puppetry, and even a spot of classical ballet. The choreography, created with the cast, is either highly physical, the group blurring the boundaries of their imaginary landscape and sometimes challenging each other with extraordinary almost recklessness, or incredibly detailed either in gesture or animalistic sinuousness – strange and beautiful. Luke Burrough, Kai-Wen Chuang, Esteban Fourmi, David Lloyd, Aoi Nakamura and Julia Robert Pares are striking individual performers and wonderful as a group, conveying a vast array of emotions and ideas through wonder, joy, exuberance, playfulness and passion and desire via cruelty, possession, control, madness and rage. All six are outstanding, demonstrating an impressive array of skills, strength and emotional connectedness and freedom – there’s that word again.
Freedom is not a simple show. You sometimes wonder where it is leading you but it is hugely watchable, impressively performed, beautifully staged, occasionally baffling, and at times thrilling and cinematic, at others dark and intimate. It’s the kind of show that is challenging, puzzling, revealing, strange, and leaves you with questions and thoughts to disentangle at the end. And that’s a good thing. That’s a kind of freedom.
Freedom Bound
Article by Dr Royona Mitra, Senior Lecturer in Drama University of Wolverhampton.
What does it mean to be free? To what extent are we as a society trapped in our desire to attain freedom? When does the search for freedom transform into an oppressive condition, in and of itself? Jasmin Vardimon examines the ironic relationship between the concepts of freedom and constraint within her latest piece of work.
Vardimon, an eminent force in British dance theatre, is renowned for her provocative, political and powerful commentaries on the complexities of contemporary life. In 7734 (2010), Vardimon explored the horrors of the Holocaust, examining how such momentous historical events continue to percolate into and mould the psyche of future generations. Lullaby (2005) examined the relationship between a diseased body and the disease itself. Using Susan Sontag's insightful work of Illness as Metaphor as a point of reference, the piece brought home disturbing truths about the parallels drawn in society between military warfare and an ill body under attack as mediated through health-care systems. Through an episodic structure that drew on sections from past works, the company's ten-year retrospective Yesterday (2008) examined the slippery spirit of democracy, the manipulative nature of memory and the politics of homes and homelessness. In Justitia (2009) Vardimon explored the legal system, and challenged its so-called objectivity by demonstrating the easy slippage between fact and fiction in the court room. The unique and interdisciplinary aesthetic that Vardimon has developed over the years integrates dance, theatre, digital arts and music, creating works that are disturbing, exhilarating, frustrating and rewarding in equal measure.
Vardimon thrives on deploying juxtapositions as a key performance strategy in exploring specific themes in her works. In Yesterday a speech on democracy was delivered by a demagogue who wielded power and control over the masses with the flick of a national flag. In 7734 we witnessed a group of seemingly liberal and cosmopolitan young people on a beach holiday, talking about the perfect scenery in front of them. Gradually their more conservative streaks were revealed as they discussed how it could be even more perfect by erasing all signs of 'otherness' from the foreign shores they were visiting. Vardimon invariably starts off revealing one side of a coin before flipping it over to present an antithetical perspective, constantly destabilising audience-expectation.
Freedom delivers this strategy with great verve. Vardimon's insightful explorations of this lofty theme is conveyed by consistently evoking images of captivity and conditions of constraint, such that one begins to question whether we are all held captive by our romanticisation of the need to be free. Or as free entities, can we and how often do we choose to remain captive? In our desire as a society to perpetually seek freedom, are we, in fact, bound by freedom and what it has come to stand for?
In the opening moments of Freedom we see a young woman standing tall and teetering over the edge of a cliff looking down at the sharp drop into the sea below her. She is exhilarated by this experience, seemingly savouring every moment of it. What follows for the next eighty minutes are episodic glimpses into her past that suggest her delight at having obtained freedom on this cliff-top. But to think of Freedom as a piece that goes back in time to chronologically tell the story of this woman's life would be naive, even reductive. Through a fragmented, anti-narrative structure that has come to be associated with the dance theatre genre, Vardimon crafts a piece which introduces us to several characters whose stories, on the surface, seem distinct and unconnected. However on closer examination, these characters and their stories overlap and morph into each other, until we start to understand them as manifestations or metaphors of each other.
A woman repeatedly walks towards the audience and says to them that she would like to us tell us a (her?) story. At times she chooses not to continue and at other times she is stopped from continuing by other performers, such that we never do hear this story. Or do we? Is her story the story of the Mermaid who is held captive in the depths of a pond by a ‘Big Bad Rabbit’ who falls in love with her beautiful voice, far away from the free waters of the sea, as conveyed through exquisite use of shadow puppetry? Or is the Mermaid's story a mythical metaphor for the life of the woman who starts off on the cliff. Such suggested overlapping of female characters, who seemingly appear to be victims of some form of captivity or another, while in fact exercising some level of choice in deciding not to be free, complicates feminism's call to bring freedom to all women. This is perhaps really brought home in the interactions we witness between the woman who climbs the cliff and her lover. Their passionate, turbulent and sado-masochistic relationship which gradually breaks down over the course of the performance, swings between his disturbing control and manipulation of her, and her need to be bound by this relationship, especially when momentarily set free. Perhaps habitually bound, the woman rejects freedom or certainly does not know what to do with it when she experiences it and seems lost without the feeling of bounded-ness.
Freedom is an honest and personal commentary that unpicks the contradictions that are innate within this mighty marker of human progress. Through humour, cynicism and sensitivity, Vardimon once again delivers a critique of political systems, social conditions and personal philosophies that we endorse and even take for granted, by revealing the complexities that nuance them.