THE CHAOS OF PROBABILITIES
By Sofia Anastasopoulou, 2009
Jasmin Vardimon’s works belong to this hybrid kind of performance in which the genres lose their importance. Theatre, dance, text and new media make up a colorful mosaic. Justitia epitomizes all the elements which persistently return in Vardimon’s works, supreme above them the body, which exposes and at the same time celebrates. A body of athletic endurance and performance, which seems not to be subject to physical limitations and to ignore "common obstacles", such as bones, joints and tendons. Also evident is an explosive mix of choreography and theatrical elements, her ironic gaze, the undiminished intensity with which she pushes the action ahead, her highlighting of social stereotypes, the crude representation of sexuality and aggression and, finally, a female gender in a position of supremacy, strong, seducing and dangerous.
Yet, what inspired Jasmin Vardimon to compose this extravagant psychological thriller and incorporate in it all sorts of references, from Pompeii to Ruth Ellis, who killed her lover and became the last woman to be executed by hanging in England, in 1955? "I usually start with a location, such as the hospital in Lullaby and the court of justice in Justitia".1 There is something strangely fascinating about the courtroom. It is a peculiarly theatrical place, with its own stage (the judge bench) and seating area (the public gallery), and it hosts the trial "performance", in which there are well defined roles, operations, movements, often even costumes for the participants. It is a key institution, with meticulously specified and strict procedures and irrevocable judgment. In the courtroom of Justitia, the defense attorney places us into the extreme position of the jury and invites us on a struggle to reconstruct the truth. Throughout this journey, we are confronted with the fragile fluidity of life: different versions of the facts, the secrecy of private moments, the sensitivity of personal confessions and a Cassandra who, with the full weight of her name, transcribes by shorthand an inescapable destiny.
Given the impossible task of finding the truth, questions arise over the nature and substance of guilt and justice, as the individual comes up against social mechanisms on an impressive rotating stage, which is more than just a stage device: The rotation establishes a convention that allows Vardimon to weave into an invisible web the events and the questions, the structures and the souls, the places and the bodies. It enables the locations to turn from communicating vessels into inaccessible constructions and the characters to retract what they had revealed. It enables objects, movement and language to enter and exit, to communicate and to be separated, to register and to delete (as in the fun rewind scenes) endlessly and inexorably. In this open network of a closed stage, Vardimon’s performers seem to be suspended between height and depth, between the delineated area of the stage and the uncertain area that extends beyond its limits.
In the chaos of probabilities, the body is revealed as physically strong but fragile in context. And if, in contemporary dance, the dancers are not dancing "from the ground up" but "with the ground", for Justitia the ground is always a sought-after connection. And so is the truth.
For the catalog of the 15th Kalamata International Dance Festival,
July 16-26 2009, on the occasion of the performance of Justitia on 19/7 & 20/7 in the Castle Amphitheatre of Kalamata / www.kalamatadancefestival.gr
Translation into English: Dimitris Saltabassis
* Interview of Jasmin Vardimon to Christos Polymenakos, Highlights magazine
37, November-December 2008, p. 108
IN CONVERSATION WITH JASMIN VARDIMON
By Mairead Turner, 2007
Over the last ten years I have been watching Jasmin’s works grow from their beginnings as intense duets and trios to their present incarnations as large ensemble works, the latest production being Justitia - located in and around a courtroom.
Jasmin started the process of making Justitia by exploring the specific location of the courtroom and the idea of different realities and how to present them to an objective jury. The courtroom is an apt representation and reflection of the dominant attitudes, beliefs and rules of a given time. A courtroom is a location like Jasmins’ previous settings of a hospital and a park that form the grand civic, public spaces where our private lives and ambitions are played out and where we can be caught at our most emotional and vulnerable.
It is from these specific locales that Jasmin begins her creative process, working through the concepts and developing the images of the sets to be built. Then comes the long working process with the dancers, starting with a research period where Jasmin pushes the boundaries of the dancers. Experience has taught her that dancers often rely on what they have done before or feel secure and successful with. Jasmin tries to break the dancers known responses, learnt ways and mannerisms and studies their other qualities that they may never have explored before. Of this process she says “for the dancers it feels as though we throw a lot away but for me it’s a way to map ideas, and I learn about the dancers. I’m looking for dancers that I feel are able to explore their versatility, that can open up, take risks, trust me, go through the process and adapt quickly”
Once the characters have developed she starts to develop the script in parallel with the scriptwriter. Jasmin has gradually introduced text into her works over the years, and Justitia feels much more aligned to a play through her collaboration with scriptwriter Rebecca Lenkewicz. In fact Justitia opens with the very process of writing, a courtroom stenographer, click - clicking the opening facts onto a typewriter, which are projected onto the set, taking us sparsely into the heart of the courtroom. The opening also signals the unswerving solidity of words which can be cleanly recorded and recalled in stark contrast to the transitory and unreliable nature of dance which can be something much more ambiguous, fragile and anamorphous.
I asked Jasmin whether she had found so much text limiting, but she had found it liberating, enabling her to include scenes such as the group therapy sessions, which alternate between harrowing, illuminating and scornfully funny vignettes on the human psyche and behaviour. The group therapy illustrates people dealing with their guilt in contrast to the courtroom where they are busy proving their innocence. The therapy sessions also serve to implicate us in our narrowing objectivity as we grow more sympathetic to the psychology of the characters.
The final part of the creative process for Jasmin is layering the music which is highly unusual in the dance-making scene and much more aligned to the film industry. Only when the movement is created does Jasmin work with the sound designer and the score. This approach has developed because she finds music so influencial and wants to rely primarily on the concept, entrusting the music to serve as the atmosphere.
Jasmin has an unswerving belief in the arts as a way of communicating ideas and concerns, through the emotional involvement of the audience. She has become less interested in creating images that are merely visually satisfying and more interested in the stories, feeling disappointed that it is seemingly easier for literature or film to emotionally involve people than dance or theatre.
In Justitia Jasmin more than ever before, wanted to get closer to the emotional and intellectual information so that the audience can engage on all levels. It is the last section that is without words and with minimal movement that affects me the most in Justitia. It is a series of eerie tableaux presented in each of the rooms of the revolving stage, that spins like a surreal carousel. We sit mesmerised and lulled by the slowly moving set, revealing dancers stilled in time, captured like a lived stop frame animation, somehow in the midst of their lives. It feels intrusive and accidental, stumbled upon, yet unbearably sad and beautiful.
Through Justitia Jasmin has again succeeded in her ambition to make Dance Theatre deeply affecting.
OXFORD TIMES
Justitia at Oxford Playhouse
Published: Thursday 16th July 2009
By David Bellan
Justitia, Vardimons new work, centres on a court case. From what Id heard I was expecting a whodunnit? It turns out to be more of a whyshedoit?, but is no less intriguing for that.
Charlie and Mimi are married.With them is Charlies friend Seth, a football-loving therapist. Charlie nips out to buy some more booze.Hes only gone for ten minutes, but when he returns, Seth is lying dead on the floor, and Mimi is accused of murdering him.
From here on, Vardimon presents us with a series of alternative reasons for his death was he killed in self-defence when he was trying to rape Mimi, or did she kill him in a rage because he didnt respond to her advances? Much of the time we are in the courtroom, one third of the clever revolving set, which also contains the flat where the death took place, and Seths therapy room, where the same characters gather to disclose what they have been shielding in real life.
Mafalda Deville is the defence lawyer, presenting her case to us, the jury. It comes over in long, scripted monologues, while the possibilities are acted and danced out behind her, sometimes directly contradicting what she is telling us.
There is also a court stenographer taking notes, which are often displayed above for us to read. Without these explanatory devices it would be hard to follow the subtleties of the story, but what really holds our interest is Vardimons characteristic, powerful chorography, part dance, part physical theatre, often defying gravity.
The cast scale a wall of chairs, Seth and Charlie dance around and over the sofa as though its a trampoline, Mimi flies through the air, bare-breasted and contorted with lust. All the characters are well drawn, and there is the extraordinary, touching rather than funny, David Nondorf, a very tall man in drag as one of Seths neurotic clients.
And, talking of drag, it does a bit by the end, when not one, but two electrifying confessions are made. But this is a clever idea, bravely carried out.
TOTALLYTHEATRE.COM / May 2009
by Janet Dowling
Justitia, Lady Justice, is dance, physical theatre and a courtroom drama with a strong, spoken narrative. The audience are addressed as the jury; we decide whether or not Mimi is innocent as she and the other characters reveal conflicting aspects of themselves while the stage revolves between three locations where parallel action, backing stories, and the characters’ feelings unfold.
The high production value of the set and lighting is due the way it is used symbolically as a surrealistic carousel representing the atmosphere and momentum of the piece. At the same time it allows the staging to use the audiences’ experience of how time is conveyed in films. We’re used to flashbacks, being able to freeze frames, rewind and revisit stories as animations and caricature. The chiaroscuro lighting of Noir films is used too. All of these techniques in Justitia had the audience laughing and sometimes cheering as they recognized the tragicomic nature of this murder given as courtroom evidence and played out as a range of possible scenarios. Did she kill him? Was she raped? Did her husband do it? Why did his friend, the group therapist Seth Marvel, spend so much time at their flat watching football and drinking beer? What about the main witness, a transvestite neighbour with a very nervous disposition?
On the night I saw the production, a lot of the audience was younger, and very responsive to the techniques used to integrate the drama with dance and a filmic musical score which included Johnny Cash’s version of , “Bridge over Troubled Water”.
Dance itself remains essential and integral to the production. The only other company I’ve seen where the dancers use such a lot of original movement and sequencing is Merce Cunningham’s troupe. What he and Jasmin Vardimon have in common is that they allow the dancers to improvise a lot of the movement themselves while encouraging them to step outside of learned balletic shapes and gesture. The result is that a lot more everyday movement, street dance and martial arts technique is rendered highly expressive in their work. Where they differ markedly is in their use of narrative. Cunningham’s work is entirely without narrative, while Vardimon uses story fully to develop her ideas.
Given the originality of the production, it was worth getting there early to read the programme. Instead of giving professional biographies of the dancers/actors, their responses to questions about how the performance was devised is recorded. Yunkrung Song researched her role as Mimi by reading about Ruth Ellis, the last person to be hanged in the UK. Paul Blackman based his character, the group therapy leader, on Tom Cruises’ performance in Magnolia. He comforts his clients, the players within the courtroom drama, by explaining that it’s OK for all of them to feel guilty as only sociopaths are without guilt.
In this way, the characters’ backing stories allow the production to explore two key situations in which we are conditioned to expect truth and actuality to be revealed.
The Peacock Theatre, with its spacious bar areas, is a good venue to check regularly if you want to explore the popular influences on dance performance. At ten to twenty pounds a ticket Jasmin Vardimon’s Justitia was excellent value for money: a must-see dance company. 5/5
BRITISH THEATRE GUIDE / 1 May 2009
by Terry O’Donovan
Justitia opens with a spine-chillingly beautiful scene which sums up the theatrical forces at play in Jasmin Vardimon's excellent courtroom dance drama. Vardimon sits at a desk clattering on the keys of a typewriter. She is dwarfed by the walls around her, reminiscent of a cell: one large white wall and another with slits and holes. Light begins to stream in through these holes, gorgeously illuminating the stage and inviting the outside world into that of Vardimon. As she continues to type her hands dart from the keys and her body takes over her storytelling.
Merle Hensel's imposing and integral set - three rooms on a revolve - spins round to reveal another typist: a stenographer sweetly detailing the meeting of a British man, Mr Cain, and a Korean woman who fall in love and marry. Their meeting and courtship is lovingly performed by Luke Burrough and Yun Krung Song using a large rug on which they slip and slide, pull each other close and which also becomes her wedding dress.
Fast-forward to the present where Mr Cain and his best friend (Paul Blackman) goof around in a hilarious and physically imaginative ode to the masculine need to whack and punch each other, reminiscent of DV8's Enter Achilles. They spin and crash, fling each other from room to room and hop through a series of physical obscenities.
Suddenly we're thrown into a courtroom. Enter Mafalda Deville as hard-hitting defence lawyer ("My stiletto will slice against your throat") for the young bride who is now accused of murdering her husband's friend.
Through 95 minutes of material, we are plunged into different versions of what could have happened in the ten minutes during which time Mr Cain left his wife and friend alone, at the end of which he was dead. What makes Justitia stand out from a run-of-the-mill whodunnit is the total theatre experience which Vardimon, in collaboration with writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz, thrillingly creates.
We see different versions of what might have happened, each time with the ending being rewound. This is most arresting during a scene in which Blackman brutally attempts to rape Song accompanied by Johnny Cash's version of Bridge Over Troubled Water. Ultimately, we never know what really did happen.
Running parallel to the trial, slightly less successfully, we get a glimpse into each characters' private guilt in the form of group therapy sessions in which the company retreat from opening up and sharing their pasts. These sections lack the bold choreography which defines the piece and become slightly chichéd in their content, with David Gonorf's female character becoming lost within the narrative. Only the stenographer's struggle with the words she transcribes shines through, brought to life touchingly by Christine Gouzelis alongside a poetic monologue by Lenkiewicz. It's a character within a courtroom drama into whom we rarely gain an insight. Gouzelis and Deville's lawyer are paralleled in a visceral and awesome duet in which they twist their bodies mid-air into a variety of positions which evoke their conscience's inner pain and struggles.
There are numerous moments of outstanding choreography and set-pieces: the company ascending a wall of chairs and disappearing at the summit; a scene in which black-clad puppeteers make it possible for Song and Blackman to become ninja-like enemies in a Matrix-style fight sequence; and the touching ending in which the ensemble end up stuck flat against the large white wall - puppets of Vardimon's imagination. Justitia is a triumphant piece of dance-theatre overflowing with moving monologues, powerful performances and surprising choreography.
MusicOMH / 1 May 2009
By Maria Lu
The ever-refreshing, ever-entertaining programme by Sadler's Wells at their central London outpost, the Peacock Theatre, continues with Justitia by Jasmin Vardimon Company, a "gripping courtroom dance drama" that is brutal and darkly comic in equal measures, set on a grand revolving stage.
Vardimon is interested in the idea of multiple truths and perspectives in a courtroom.
Which is the real truth, out of a selection of 'truths' presented at a hearing? Is objectivity ever possible?
In the opening, we see a court stenographer on her typewriter. One arm creates shapes and movements in time with the sounds of typing – like a conductor, conducting the fate of people.
Justitia is a truly multi-disciplinary piece – breathtaking physical theatre is combined with text and speech from dancers who are, it must be noted, extraordinary actors too.
That the dancers can act and speak confidently makes all the difference, since the story is told primarily through dialogue. Done poorly, it could easily have looked like an A-level performing arts project.
There are big set pieces that really show off what the dancers are made of, such as an early sequence that had the two lead males fooling around at home: while this testosterone-fuelled meeting is very true to life, you can't help but also notice just how difficult and risky their throws and jumps are. But Vardimon is equally fond of small, subtle movements: a twist of ankle, a move of head, a little game of musical chairs.
There is a recurring theme of manipulation. One ethereal scene features two duets in unison, with one behind shutters: a manipulation of the lawyer and the stenographer, suggesting different layers of truth. In another, the lawyer applies make-up on a witness, speaking for and moving her like a dummy. Manipulation is a dirty lawyer's trick, of course, and she admits this herself in a later scene, telling the audience: "I'm gonna wrap you around my little finger."
The story revolves around the murder of Seth Marvel (a show-stealing performance by Paul Blackman), found dead in the home his best friend, Charlie Cain, shares with his wife, Mimi. Cain came home after a ten-minute booze run to find Marvel sprawled across the Kazakh rug in the front room. There is only one suspect: Mimi, the only other person in the house.
The most important thing, of course, is to establish what happened. Led by Mimi's defence lawyer, the jury (that is us, the audience) is presented with several versions of what happened. Did the jealously she felt for her husband's friendship drive her to hit Marvel over the head with a lamp for no good reason? Was it the illicit love affair between Mimi and Marvel that led to a tragic accident? Did she feel humiliated enough to murder a man she tried unsuccessfully to seduce? Or, in the most nightmarish scenario, was it an act of self-defence as she attempted to fight off a man trying to rape her?
This last sequence was a turning point in Justitia. Up until that scene, the piece had been full of laughter (and a lot of laughter at that) – it's a relatively humorous take on a whodunit story. This unexpected scene hit the audience like a slap in the face, and we felt silent. It was horrific and uncomfortable viewing, for women in particular, no doubt – but it also proved just how well-choreographed, well-acted Justitia is.
The sombre tone continues for the rest of the piece, though there is one notable exception: the opening sequence in the second act, where Mimi and Marvel are set against each other in a slow-mo, arcade-style, cartoonish kung-fu fight, held up by other dancers clad in black, all to a jazzed up remix of the Pac-Man theme tune. OK, so it has been done before (in a Pepsi Max advert several years ago), and it's pretty stupid, but it did provide some much-needed relief in an increasingly sinister turn of events.
The audience does find out the truth in the end, in the form of a confession from Mimi, revealing her story to the stenographer behind shutters like a Catholic to a priest. But the truth is irrelevant – it is the process of finding the truth, the concept of justice, objectivity and manipulation that is fascinating, and Justitia has tackled this with gusto.
BALLET.COM / 1 May 2009
By Emma Stevenson
An extravaganza of impressive physicality, a formidable set design and both harrowing and hilarious theatre; Jasmin's dance theatre makes you stand up and listen, and Justitia is no exception.
The story revolves around the death of a man who has been killed in self defence, murder or accidentally by his best friend's wife. The various options are played out in front of the audience and as 'jurors', it is us who are left to decide the verdict. Clever use is made of this relationship - just before the interval, the lawyer finishes her speech directly addressing the 'jury', informing us we will break for 20 minutes when we can consider what we have seen.
On a grand revolving stage of three segments, the action takes place largely in a courtroom and a living room. The courtroom makes ingenious use of chairs with legs slotted into holes in the wall, to store when not in use and for bodies to climb, dangle from, seductively dance around and diagonally slot into. The change of atmosphere through the lighting and different rooms is incredibly effective, as the audience is taken to all extremes of the boisterous and slapstick to the quiet and disturbing. Overall, the revolving stage – operated largely by the dancers – gives the impression of a group of people stuck in a world that they are trying to make sense of and constantly being moved through.
From the start, the magically-lit typist sets the scene, demonstrating the power of words to not only tell a story, but like the stenographer, decide someone's fate. Justitia is much more aligned to a play with more use of text through Vardimon's close collaboration with scriptwriter Rebecca Lenkewicz. It is often a tricky balance with displayed text and movement and for the most part Jasmin Vardimon gets it spot on. Only a few times, did my senses feel stretched as I tried to take in both the written word 'typed' on a screen and the lithe and seductive movements, for instance, of the mesmerising Christine Gouzelis.
The same applies to the theatrical element of the piece. More often than not, the movement phrases and acting worked incredibly well together, though at times there was a sense that there was too much going on unncessarily. The combination worked best for me when the movement literally spoke a response. For instance, in one of the group therapy sessions where the characters are working through their guilt, the therapist asks, 'So, who would like to go first?'- the whole group leaps as one onto the floor like fish trying to escape a net, triggering an empathetic uproar of laughter. For dancers, many not trained in theatre, their acting was strong and convincing, particularly Mafalda Deville, who plays the headstrong lawyer and group therapy client and Paul Blackman, the victim and therapist who echoed Tom Cruise's character in Magnolia. YunKrung Song who played the challenging role of the accused was also arresting, and did not hold back with her at times violent and overtly sexual character.
Amidst these other art forms, the energetic dance phrases were impressive, with an emphasis on the angular, knee work on the floor and acrobatic leaps. Playing on video technologies of freeze frame, rewind and slow motion, there are several extremely physical scenes bordering on acrobatics and martial arts. In a highly effective one, the two main players are engaged in a 'Crouching, Tiger'-like fight, with other performers in backstage-black carrying them through the air and allowing them to enact super-human manoeuvres. Clever and tightly executed, the audience was wrapped and in hysterics, applauding the scene once over.
Atmospherically and entertainment-wise, Justitia is a huge success. Emotionally though I did feel somewhat empty by the end, and wondered whether the attempts to involve the audience emotionally had been too forced and overstated. In the programme Jasmine refers to “feeling disappointed that it is seemingly easier for literature or film to emotionally involve people than dance or theatre”. Justitia left me reflecting on this subjective statement as there are several dance pieces that have stirred me deeply. Whilst watching dance may be a different emotional experience from that experienced with a narrative film, personally this is what makes it unique and valuable, and definitely no less satisfying.
Nevertheless, the spectacular set design, acting and discipline of the dancers was a complete joy to watch. Our position as jurors allowed the audience insight into the messiness of perceptions and how fragile the truth can be. Instead of arriving at a clear verdict, I left feeling that any one of the realities presented could be true, and perhaps it is this non-judgmental nature of Vardimon's work that makes it so powerful.
WORTHING HERALD & LITTLEHAMPTON GAZETTE / 17 March 2009
JUSTITIA: Brighton Dome
By Richard Amey
"This work is daring in its goal-setting and searingly successful in its means. The dancing serves to expand the emotion, tension and the penetration of Vardimon's concepts about our psychology"
If you thought total theatre could not include dance to extend language, think again. Or introduce yourself to the Jasmin Vardimon Company. Well before well nigh on two hours of action concluded, Justitia, and moreover Vardimon, had convinced me at last the concept was viable. The theory is easily imaginable, far less easily conjurable. Musicals work this way but without dance being integral throughout. Yet attempts until now to use dance alongside speech to convey, elaborate and expand upon narrative in a drama has resulted in often ludicrous contrivance and absurd banality.
Justitia is a thriller. But would you have dancers acting, speaking and moving on stage to perform an Agatha Christie? Justitia is a courtroom more complex than that.
Vardimon, who operates out of Brighton and whose skill, insight and observation already qualify her as a city treasure, tackles the twin issue, she said after Monday's performance, of guilt and real justice.
Her Justitia (commissioned by Gardner Arts Centre as well as Sadler's Wells and three others) proclaims that no matter how agonising a reality and knife-thrust is guilt, true justice may prove impossible to determine.
To throw a crime, an apparent murder, under spotlights from several angles and therefore many points of view suggestible to a juror, is not new. In comedy, Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests showed happenings seen through three different windows andactually occupied three plays, ideally seen sequentially.
Vardimon's perspectives on whether the wife in a love triangle was guilty of murder or manslaughter, and what was her exact motive in several different possible scenarios, left us only guessing.
We might have had an inkling by the interval, when the play's excellent barrister, Mafalma Deville, invited the audience to ponder. But by the conclusion most were unable to give a confident verdict.
As for guilt, the final revelation and twist, confessed by YunKrung Song's stricken character, served as a sobering reminder of the weight of responsibility upon jury members.
Vardimon is of our times, and at the forefront of them in her territory of art. After Tanja Liedtke's Twelfth Floor showed at this venue earlier this month that the late German was at the cutting edge, Justitia took the eager Corn Exchange audience at least one stage further.
This work is daring in its goal-setting and searingly successful in its means. The dancing serves to expand the emotion, tension and the penetration of Vardimon's concepts about our psychology.
She appears in a subsidiary eighth role, mainly separate from the seven main characters, who are performed by four acting-speaking-dancing men and three women.
They are acrobatic and powerfully direct. There is some staggering and even dangerous ensemble work. And they need a head for heights and a mind for safety on a wall through which upright chairs positioned sideways form a bizarre climbing grid that in a final tableau acts, through its protruding feet on the other side, as almost a bed of nails.
The scenery is a revolving, three-segmented pie chart creating three interlinked rooms in which only one — the scene of the crime — is constant.
It is an ingeniously creation and a resourceful vehicle for extra choreographic and dramatic scope, executed by Miraculous Engineering to the brief of costume and set designer Merle Hensel.
There is here an extra element — sculpture — identified by Tate Modern curator, Catherine Wood. And Sadler's Wells chief executive and artistic director Alistair Spalding spots immediately that the characters, instead of being speechless, flat-dimensional moving dance images, are fleshed-and-blooded out. And where words fail, dance (like music) supercedes.
The music is hugely varied, from Vivaldi and Purcell to the contemporary, instrumental and song, and descends from the advantage of our modern, vastly eclectic and catholic heritage.
Vardimon's work, as exemplified here, is a tours de force in communication. The Israeli is stretching a European tradition of dance theatre across to our shores. Only now, it seems, are we British at large ready to embrace it. Next week on tour, the French will be lauding it.
THE STAGE / 11 May 2007
by Lyndsey Winship
In her latest dance theatre piece, Justitia, Jasmin Vardimon matches narrative clarity with astonishing visual imagery in a balance that is notoriously difficult to achieve. Where the text in much dance theatre relies on a clumsy mix of memories and observations devised by the performers, Justitia wisely uses a script, by writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz, which provides a solid structure for Vardimon’s movement to enhance, explore and illuminate.
The premise is a murder trial, where we are presented with a number of variations on the events of the fatal evening. Dancers Paul Blackman and YunKrung Song - playing the victim and the accused - get the chance to really test their versatility as actor/performers and both come off well. Also impressive is Victoria Fox as the defence lawyer, who must carry the narrative as well as throwing herself into the extreme physicality of Vardimon’s choreography.
Just as Vardimon realises the limitations of movement to convey a detailed narrative, she capitalises on its power, beyond words, to cleverly construct or deconstruct characters. And she manages the changing pace and mood of the piece, from humour to horror, without losing coherence.
Integral to the show is the brilliant rotating set, divided into three interconnected spaces, and dramatically lit. One wall is riddled with holes and pierced by sharp shafts of light, each looking like the sword of Lady Justice herself. The production values are high, but that would be irrelevant without substance. Luckily, Justitia is a piece of powerful choreography with that rare commodity - genuine theatrical appeal.
NOTTINGHAM EVENING POST
by Alan Geary
This extraordinary piece takes us to the edge of the modern dance genre. At times it plunges into legitimate theatre: each performer plays, not simply a representative type, but a real, well-delineated character with a name and a personal narrative.
It's a courtroom drama: a woman is on trial for the murder of her husband's friend. The interval serves as a recess during which we're invited by the defence lawyer to consider our verdict.
Essentially the first half consists of enactment of various hypotheses as to how the killing occurred: it incorporates repetition and amusing slow-motion rewinds, all remarkably well done. The second half opens out into a general exploration of the concept of guilt before telling us what really happened.
On a visually stunning revolving set, the performers move with amazing suppleness and agility, not only on the floor but up the walls, evoking a nightmarish quality.
Music and sound effects, and a screen on which the work of the court stenographer is displayed, are essential components of a rich and satisfying evening.
SOUTH WALES ARGUS // 4 May 2007
The medium of dance theatre pushed all boundaries when Jasmin Vardimon's Justitia was performed at Newport Riverfront last night.
Delving into the depths of our justice system, the audience were taken into a breathtaking investigation of a gripping crime story.
Events that lead to the death of a central character - therapist Seth Marvel - and the resulting trial of Mimi Kane, which drew comparisons on Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hung in Britain for murder.
The drama unfolded on an atmospherically lit, revolving stage moving with ease between the crime scene, the court house and a group therapy room.
Each scene allowed the characters to give a powerful portrayal of emotion physically and was delivered with a fusion of high energy and smooth, meticulous choreography.
Victoria Fox moved effortlessly between two strong dialogue roles as the defense lawyer and a therapy patient while Athanasia Kanellopoulou displayed virtuosity in physical delivery by making dance funny and intelligent.
Vardimon's script allowed comedy to mix with drama and touched on sensitive and sometimes taboo topics, making Justitia a must see.