NEW STATESMAN / 21 November 2005
Going to dance shows is usually, in my experience, a source of joy and exhilaration. I made a special note of the name Jasmin Vardimon - a 34-year-old, London-based Israeli and former psychological "interviewer" - when I saw her extraordinary, sexy and beautiful dance piece at The Place in central London a couple of years ago.
Vardimon's work amalgamates the styles of the legendary German and American choreographers Pina Bausch and Mark Morris to create subtle social commentary. It is, however, more physically sophisticated than that produced by acclaimed modern dance companies such as DV8 or Frantic Assembly. Her new work, Park, continues this tradition.
The on-stage park is both an idyllic prison and an urban safety valve, its inhabitants alternately caged and liberated by their common predicament. A stone mermaid comes alive in a gushing fountain. A skinhead, body-popping rapper vaults the mesh wire with a bouncing ball and transmutes into a growling dog. A bag lady sheds layers of clothing and becomes a tourist guide.
Park incorporates dance-floor moves into a strict modern choreography, then elevates physical expression to an intensified plane of athleticism. The dancers dive sideways through the air and land with the grace of falling leaves. Having lately dislocated my shoulder and sprained both ankles (don't ask), I marvelled at their rapid footwork, twists and turns and elegant tumbles. One skating duet is pure mimetic magic. A quartet of lads bounce hilariously on their feet like puppets on pogo sticks.
The show's soundtrack includes songs by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Brian Eno and Fiona Apple. There is a gorgeously witty version of "Singin' in the Rain" (Gene Kelly's steps retraced around a city street lamp) and an irresistible company number, the cast sideways-on, whirling their arms like synchronised windmills, set to the Beatles' "Across the Universe".
In dramatic terms, however, the show is a non-event. It gathers the inmates - who include a flame-haired nymphomaniac who thrusts her head down the skinhead's trousers, an aggressive graffiti-spraying malcontent and a somewhat peripheral Japanese tourist - without developing any storyline beyond the exercise of building ensemble choreography. For me, that is enough. For you, it may not be.
Vardimon borrows from Mark Morris the technique of building up dancers into a phalanx, and she also draws on Pina Bausch's meticulous attention to physical detail, incorporating wristy hand jives and diagonal processional set pieces. But it takes your own talent to keep the stage as alive and interesting as she does for the full 95 minutes of the show.
Last month the Paris Opera Ballet visited Sadler's Wells with a very differ- ent sort of park life. Le Parc, one of the company's signature ballets, was a work of shimmering beauty, tracing sexual games and a central erotic duet through a ravishing accompaniment of slow movements from Mozart. The setting was a classical parkland infiltrated at the edges by modern life, its sentiments and strategies inspired by the comedies of Marivaux and Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses.
Just as Vardimon's scenario recalls the idea of a recreational retreat where anything might happen, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream, so Le Parc inverts the same idea by showing a structured, classical hinterland, a place of order and decorum eventually destabilised by erotic adventure. Both pieces have a modern precedent in Botho Straub's rich and suggestive play of 1983, The Park, which updates Shakespeare's comedy while accommodating the violence and anomie of the contemporary city.
In this sort of cultural company, Vardimon's piece may seem flat or undernourished, but she transcends these objections through the vim and vigour of her dance ideas, the amazing physical prowess of her nine performers and the generosity of her musical instincts. In its scale and aspiration, Park signals Vardimon's growing confidence and flair.
SHEFFIELD STAR /5 November 2005
By John Highfield
In a run-down open space dominated by a mermaid fountain, a strange and ill-assorted group of people meet in a bizarre dance of passion, danger and raw sexuality. The key to choreographer Jasmin Vardimon's study of humans and their behaviour probably lies with that mythical aquatic symbol for the females all gradually emerge as strong, seductive and dangerous. In the early scenes it is the men who dominate - one electrifying routine is a testosterone-fuelled display of overt masculinity, sweaty and threatening. For all their bluster and brutality, though, these preening, strutting emblems of the male of the species are quickly stripped quite literally back to their animal origins as they metamorphose into a dog, a monkey, a chicken.
Frequently very funny, with some marvellous flourishes of visual humour, Vardimon's work can equally be repetitive and frustrating. Nevertheless, you can't help but be caught up in the excellence of this extremely sexy young company's stage presence - their ensemble pieces have the sort of perfection we too seldom see in contemporary dance.
It's an evening of transformations in the style of a modern fairy tale, baffling and sometimes beguiling and just when it threatens to take itself too seriously, there's a sort of conspiratorial wink at the audience, a reminder that we shouldn't worry too much about the meaning but enjoy an enthusiastic piece of outrageous theatre.
MUSIC OMH / 4 October 2005
By Chris Ingold
Park is the latest assault on the boundaries between dance and theatre by choreographer Jasmin Vardimon. Devised around a hyper-real representation of a park and its residents, it's a thrilling urban fantasy that fully demonstrates Vardimon's drive to strike away at the pretensions associated with theatrical genre. In doing so she has created a show that is accessible to all. It's a magical piece of work, and one which delivers on many of its ambitious goals.
The piece is made up of a series of overlapping vignettes that pull together the dramas experienced by the regular and the not-so-regular inhabitants of an inner city park. There's a bag lady, a graffiti artist laying his emotions bare with spraypaint and an agitated thug rallying against some injustice he can't quite get hold of or find the words to describe. A homeless man tries to get some rest curled up by a fence, and a couple of foreign tourists take photographs of a fountain.
Dominating proceedings is a mermaid, the fountain's inhabitant, drawing those that enter her territory into a Siren-like spell (and more often than not, taking the audience with her).
As the various strands play out, the thug, played by Leon Baugh, finds himself being subdued and dominated by both Mafalda Deville's drunken tyrant and Fernanda Prata's startlingly seductive mermaid. The graffiti artist (Conor Doyle) also falls for the mermaid, and into self-destruction.
Vardimon's choreographic style, emphasing raw physicality, slapstick humour and compelling eroticism over displays of formal technique, works wonders in drawing out and enlarging the various narrative strands, bringing a surrealist hyper-reality and romanticism to proceedings.
Whilst initially this seems like a British park, both the styling and the larger-than-life characters give it a feel more Latin than English - if anything the style owes a heavy debt to the bold and colourful traditions of Catalan dance theatre. Perhaps the presence of one Portuguese and two Brazilian performers has had an influence on the work, though it feels very much like this is Vardimon's preferred territory.
The sensual, and sexual tensions at play are also extraordinary, and pretty alien to most of us who have spent any time observing inner city parks in Britain. The men ooze a brooding matador-like masculinity, classically tragic anti-heroes doomed to fall into temptation by the teasing mermaid - and who wouldn't be? Fernanda Prata commands every inch of the stage she touches, every twist and turn surrounding her in an aura of unbridled sexuality.
In a masterful display of coordination, both Prata and Doyle at one point combine bodies to bring a ten-foot Prata to the stage, managing the tricky feat of amplifying the sensuality rather than slipping into a circus act, and delivering one of the show's defining moments.
If anything, the only thing that perhaps lets down Vardimon's masterful production is that the hints of grand myth and tragic narrative never resolve into something deeper, something truly epic. However Park is more of a dream narrative, one that fractures and peaks until finally you wake to find yourself cheering at the performers, shortly to retire to a brisk autumn night and perhaps look differently on your own local park as you pass it on your way back home.