Articles
BODY MAPPING: HOMING BODIES THROUGH NEW TECHNOLOGY IN JASMIN VARDIMON COMPANY'S YESTERDAY
By Royona Mitra, Senior Lecturer in Drama & Performance, University of Wolverhampton & PhD Candidate at Drama & Theatre Department, Royal Holloway, University of London
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Reviews
LONDONDANCE.COM / 21 Nov 2008
Yesterday: Peacock Theatre, London
By Rachel Nouchi
Jasmin Vardimon is a trailblazer in the sense that she takes onboard serious content and uses the stage to grapple with the underbelly of life; nasty, uncomfortable issues rarely touched upon in dance. Dance is a violent, aggressive, combative affair in the world that Vardimon creates and visually pleasing aesthetics of movement or showcasing dancers' technical prowess holds no interest. Instead, her eight strong troupe are vessels through which the choreographer attempts to challenge and shock, touching on subjects from disease, Neo Nazism and the battles of the sexes to name but a few, which are discussed and dissected both verbally and physically onstage.
Yesterday is essentially a muse on memory, uniting elements of several earlier works to mark the occasion of the company’s 10th year anniversary. It opens with a women singing in Portuguese swinging a fishing rod into the audience while balancing on the feet of man who is lying on his back. The image is striking and builds anticipation for what's to come.
Born and raised on Kibbutz in Israel, the choreographer draws on her experiences as a psychological profiler in the Israeli Army, and such influences are strongly present in her work. There is an intensity and violence that perhaps stems from her army days, echoed by big brother screens; tortuous, industrial, groaning music and aggressive encounters between the dancers. Vardimon is not afraid of anything and that includes tearing up the rule book, mixing and matching all forms of expression from speech to clever props, screens like giant out of tune TV sets sliding on and offstage and several make-believe scenarios. This is a multi-media night that brings dance, text, speech, animation and video art to the stage. Bursts of movement, however, through which the dancers are either fighting with another or hurling through the air defying gravity, are used sparingly.
The spoken voice is a presence throughout, as is comedy. In one scenario, performer, Luke Burrough, barks out to the audience as if addressing a lecture hall, a speech about an unknown disease that must be eradicated. Disease, takes the form of dancer, Mafalda Deville dressed in black and a tightly choreographed, violent fight follows as the couple fall around the stage shrieking and grunting, until Burrough crushes her and sticks a pillow on her face. As if she is nothing more than a cartoon character, the dancer teeters around the stage with a pillow glued to her face and the effect is surprisingly comical. Burrough proves to be a strong actor and his booming voice is heard again in a Neo Nazi like rant when he barges onstage interrupting a solo, grabs a megaphone to deliver a rant about banning dance. The camera close up of his mouth spewing violence, projected onto a giant backdrop screen, is unsettling.
Screens and cinematography play an important part in Vardimon’s work. A tiny video camera sits at the front of the stage and dancer, Yun Krung Song, uses a thick black greasepaint stick to lovingly draw lines around her body. As we watch her slowly draw over her anatomy in a quiet moment, reminiscent of some ancient custom, her body is projected and magnified onto a large screen at the back of the stage, so her body becomes the backdrop. Later she draws a house and windows on her tummy, again magnified onto the screen behind. This in turn becomes a backdrop used by the performers to create an inventive scenario. A couple sit proudly outside their house, (her tummy) a cyclist delivers a newspaper, and a little girl appears at the window upstairs watching a puppet butterfly flit past. The scene is one of momentary domestic bliss, all too soon to be shattered. The drawing doesn’t stop there and Song smudges out the house with her black stick and billows of smoke appear from stage left. The house is on fire and the child upstairs lost to the flames. What follows can only be described as a mourning dance. The couple, again fight and wrestle, entangled in each other’s grief, and the audience forget that what they are looking at is sheer fantasy, a drawing on a tummy come to life.
What's so commendable about Yesterday is that despite the gravity of issues Vardimon deals with, there is real humour embedded in her choreography. A rib-tickling brand of humour that makes the audience laugh out loud, not the restrained ironic intellectual variety, that may procure a self-satisfying grin. As with all great satirists, she finds routes through which to inject humour into situations at their most depressing. Vardimon gives the audience license to laugh, albeit in a slapstick way, it is nonetheless welcome. It may be through some funny play on words scrawled onto a whiteboard in green fluorescent pen, or a philosophical muse on the theme of memory, or a row of eight naked bottoms wiggling and quivering in and out of time to the industrial beat. But her ability to weave humour into the gravest of subjects gives Vardimon's choreography a humanity and roundness that elevates an otherwise heavily depressing night into an entertaining one, oozing with originality and invention.
THE GUARDIAN / 24 Nov 2008
Yesterday: Peacock Theatre, London
By Sanjoy Roy
Israeli-born choreographer Jasmin Vardimon founded her company 10 years ago - to mark the event, she has choreographed a new piece, called simply Yesterday, a resetting of selected scenes from her body of work. Vardimon, though, is much too tough for nostalgia: this is less a trip down memory lane than a series of blasts from her past. In the opening - to a pounding beat and backed by a screen buzzing with eye-scorching televisual static - the eight dancers scuffle, reel, launch upwards and dive downwards, all in strict formation. The hard-hitting, attention-grabbing combination of anarchic energy with military discipline pins us to our seats.
Now she can show us her stuff. And that reveals two special strengths. She is good at putting metaphors into material form. Luke Burrough and Mafalda Deville play a doctor and patient whose particularly vicious pillow-fight perfectly poses a troubling question: does treating sickness become attacking the sick? Another scene links flag-waving to the broader cultural climate: Burrough makes a blustering, nationalist speech, and his wantonly brandished English flag sends the dancers scudding and tumbling, as if buffeted by storms.
Secondly, Vardimon is also inventive with visual technology, often superimposing relayed images onto live action. For a piece dealing with memory, this is particularly suggestive; nowhere more so than the thermal screen that bears the shadows of bodies pressed against it, or the fading imprint of words and scribbles.
... Yesterday clearly hit the spot for its vociferous and largely very youthful audience.
THE TIMES / 6 Nov 2008
Yesterday: Corn Exchange, Newbury
By Donald Hutera
Fresh out of dance school, the budding choreographer Jasmin Vardimon went into the Israeli Army for two years. Her job was to draw up psychological profiles of new recruits. That experience has been put to good use in her subsequent career. Her observations of human behaviour are sharp and unsparing.
Vardimon’s new touring show Yesterday is about memories, but aesthetic rather than personal ones. During the decade that she has headed her own UK-based company, her interest in physical theatre has increased alongside the scale of her ambitions. Packed tight with striking images and fierce, sometimes funny and rarely tender actions, this production is both a distillation and an edgy, extremely clever refashioning of much of the work she has made to date.
Scenes from past performances have been shuffled about, as if in a vivid, unpredictable dream, and fairly seamlessly sewn together by Vardimon and the designer Guy Bar-Amotz. They have split the back wall into strips of paper which, when the eight-strong cast isn’t slipping through it, serves as a projection screen. The visual element is lent further emphasis by a smaller, wheeled screen used fleetingly but ingeniously for animations, shadow play and painting with light.
Physically the dominant tone is aggression, a quality that Vardimon’s fighting-fit dancers embody with just the right amount of ironic detachment. In an episode of brutal black comedy Mafalda Deville repeatedly attacks the long, sturdy Luke Burrough with a pillow as he delivers a lecture on how to combat a nameless disease. Later Christine Gouzelis, an unexpectedly nymphomaniacal blonde, turns Tim Casson’s jogger into her dog.
Throughout Vardimon segues between depicting the pitfalls of male-female relations and a wider social malaise. The latter culminates with a bare-chested Burrough spouting neo-Nazi philosophies into a megaphone as the others stumble and swerve at every swipe of his crude flag. In such a violent context the few quieter, saner moments are especially welcome, as when YunKrung Song, seated before a tiny video camera, uses a black marker to trace a line down her body. Simultaneously seen behind her in close-up, Song’s private handiwork is odd and surprisingly touching.
OXFORD TIMES / 6 Nov 2008
YESTERDAY: Corn Exchange, Newbury
By David Bellan
The Israeli choreographer Jasmin Vardimon came to the UK in 1997. Ten years of work have produced eight hours of stage material plus many hours of rehearsal material, and in Yesterday, premiered in September, she visits her memories of these past creations. There is a danger of course that this would turn out to be an indigestible hodgepodge of unconnected bits and pieces. What holds it together is the consistency of her mainly pessimistic view of the human condition, the aggression between men and women – with the woman usually coming out on top – and the daring way in which the dancers hurl themselves and each other around.
Vardimon makes clever use of technology throughout her work. Yesterday (pictured) opens with a man lying on his back, feet in the air. On those feet stands YunKrung Song. She is holding a fishing-rod, from which dangles a camera. What she is filming – mainly us, the audience – appears on a huge screen behind her.
Later she places herself in front of a static camera at the front of the stage, and we see her drawing a thick black line from head to toe, dividing her left brain from the right, the emotional from the cerebral, tracing (according to Vardimon) the scars and marks of her physical and mental self. There is some humour as we get a lecture on avoiding disease, with the excellent Mafalda Deville as a speedy, contorted virus. Elswehere, predatory Christine Gouzelis manipulates and tries to seduce the reluctant Tim Casson. There is a long section from Park – a marvellous work in its entirety – in which the dancers are blown this way and that by the wind of a fiercely-waved revolutionary flag, and an extraordinary finale, much reminiscent of the work of Pina Bausch, in which the dancers whirl though a deep carpet of feathers.
Personally, I would rather see one complete work, but for those unfamiliar with Vardimon’s style, this makes an interesting tasting menu.
HI-ARTS.CO.UK /31 October 2008
Yesterday: OneTouch Theatre, Eden Court, Inverness
GEORGINA COBURN goes on a journey through memory with the Jasmin Vardimon Company.
THE JASMIN VARDIMON Company celebrate their 10th anniversary with Yesterday, presenting a retrospective of new work and excerpts from previous shows. The production explores the idea of the choreographer’s memory in what Vardimon describes as a “process of recall … rather like walking backwards; there is no straight line and the path can be a bumpy one.”
The production is certainly sporadic and lacking coherence in a strict narrative sense. However, it is precisely this approach that allows the greatest freedom in terms of taking the audience on a journey to a series of unexpected destinations. More performance art than choreography, Vardimon utilises multimedia, animation, dialogue, music and movement in an innovative and experimental way.
This is physical, visceral theatre where the body is explored, written upon and turned inside out through animation. Vardimon’s training as a psychological interviewer during a period of conscripted military service in Israel, her powers of observation and her “body memory” as a dancer are all visibly brought to bear upon the work.
There are fleeting moments of sheer brilliance in this show, sequences that are violently powerful counterbalanced by playfulness, humour and direct addresses to the audience.
The OneTouch Theatre is the perfect space for engagement with an audience at this level of intimacy and immediacy. Use of technology, including real time film footage projected onto the set, displayed dramatic close ups of the dancers and their character’s emotional state.
Ordinarily the audience is protected from such display by theatrical distance and the comfort of traditional elements of choreography, which even in contemporary dance are rooted in the classical tradition. Vardimon incorporates street fighting, martial arts, gymnastics, stage falls and slapstick in movement often anchored low to the floor. This grounding of the work and movement on a horizontal axis is extremely interesting in relation to the choreographer’s exploration of memory and her implied world view.
There is nothing romantic in Vardimon’s choreography; wherever there is seemingly gentle music, an expression of love or a pas de deux it is never without irony and often accompanied by violence. Dancers are trembling and vulnerable rather than united in any kind of lyrical embrace. This approach is refreshing and the movement precise, but the effect can also be acutely distressing.
The post-fire sequence is a prime example, where the tortured movement and rigidity of the dancing couple is a horrific combination of tenderness and revulsion. In another sequence Vardimon combines the banality and upbeat humour of a weather report with the observation of a violent relationship written on the body.
The fight between the body and disease is the dynamic in another sequence, this internal war of attrition delivered with great comic effect. Throughout this production there is no light without darkness and in this way the choreographer anchors the work firmly in reality.
This is also echoed in a sequence set ironically to ‘The Power of Love’, where the waving of a flag is almost like the action of a scythe cutting its sway through the group of dancers. The dialogue beginning with ‘I Believe’ delivers a series of dichotomies “dictated democracy”, “individuality expressed in exactly the same way”, “united division” and “The borders that join us together”. The political implications of this work make this one of the most powerful statements in the production.
In painterly terms pure line is used as movement to mesmerising effect, through projection, UV light effects and marker pen on the body. In terms of the overall design, however, there were times when the production felt technologically laden. Sometimes the ultimate trick is deciding when not to use it. Defined by raw physicality and layering of multimedia this is a striking production of memorable albeit fragmentary moments.
© Georgina Coburn, 2008
MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS / 28 Oct 08
Yesterday: The Lowry
By Robert Beale
JVC are energy-filled and entertaining, with very physical dance – tumbling as much as dancing, much of it - allied to text, video and very clever use of projection.
The programme, called Yesterday, is a retrospective of 10 years of their choreographer’s work. A bit tricky for those of us who haven’t been following Jasmin Vardimon through that time, but what you get is a sequence of contrasting episodes that makes a fascinating programme.
There are some recurrent themes, and bits of stories. It was rather disturbing that one of those themes seemed to be violence (simulated violence, anyway, but it was still vivid) as a metaphor of human relationships.
Tender images
It was ameliorated by some tender images, too, and the final burst of ‘Christ, have mercy’ from Mozart’s Requiem offered a kind of redemption, but that was because of the music mainly.
There’s fun and comedy in Vardimon’s creations, too, whether it’s dancers showing us the dimples on their bottoms or bouncing like jelly beans to Hot Butter’s Popcorn (one of my favourite instrumentals from 1972, I admit).
But most impressive of all was the split-second precision and control of those performers. They are virtuosi of contemporary physical dance, and whereas some do it pretty well, Jasmin Vardimon Company do it to perfection.
WHATSONSTAGE.COM / 28 Oct 08
Yesterday: The Lowry
By Glenn Meads
Yesterday marks Jasmin Vardimon’s 10th anniversary with a retrospective journey into the concept of the memory. If you are a fan, you get to meet characters from previous works including Justitia, Lullaby and Park.
This highly original dance piece works on many levels. Vardimon refuses to be pigeonholed and simply repeat herself, which gives the show a fresh appeal even for audience members who know her work. As Jasmin herself says: “There is no central narrative”- but this does not matter. Visually, this is absolutely stunning.
From the opening scene featuring a dancer fishing, stood on the soles of a colleague to the exhausting (for the dancers) and frantic finish, Yesterday restores your faith in dance as it stands out from the pack.
The great thing about Vardimon is that she inserts moments of calm alongside the most frenetic sections. YunKrung Song draws a house on her navel which is then projected onto enormous blinds, from which other dancers pop out, creating a warped vision, reminscent of Alice In Wonderland meets Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. It is beautifully rendered and the effect is uteerly mesmerising.
Song is a brilliant performer, as she is so expressive; her face etched with pain. She, like all of the members of the company move with grace but also act beautifully, bringing genuine emotion to their section, when required.
Mafalda Deville and Luke Burrough are a dazzling double act; one of them plays a disease, whilst the other battles it out with words, followed by actions. Each thud on the stage, shows the audience how dangerous Vardimon’s dance can be. But, as a result it has an edgy quality which Matthew Bourne often lacks in his work.
At times, Yesterday is slightly self indulgent and therefore may not be to all tastes, but with multi media effects, athletic movement, great peformances, laughter, pain and highly original choreography, it should earn Vardimon the respect she deserves.
THE OBSERVER / 14 Sept 08
Yesterday: Corn Exchange, Brighton Dome
By Luke Jennings
Consuming love, and a killer virus
Israeli choreography combines startling moves with cutting-edge camerawork
Jasmin Vardimon, whose new work, Yesterday, premiered in Brighton last week, was born in Israel in 1971. She decided that her future lay in performance when she was 14, and her dance-class was drafted to cover a Tel Aviv stage with pink carnations for a performance of Pina Bausch's Nelken. After working for several years with the Kibbutz Dance Company, Vardimon moved to Britain and in 1997 formed her own ensemble. Since then she has produced a series of dance-theatre pieces which turn an unsparing but ultimately compassionate eye on contemporary human behaviour. Her best-known piece is probably the darkly suggestive Lullaby (2004), which is set in a hospital and was inspired by her father's death from cancer.
Yesterday takes the form of a 10-year retrospective, and unites elements of several works: long-term Vardimonistas will recognise reworked scenes from Justitia (2007), Park (2005), Lullaby and Ticklish (2001), among others. The piece opens with a female dancer, YunKrung Song, standing on the feet of a man who is lying on his back. She is holding a fishing rod with a camera attached, with which she films the audience. It's a typically space-disrupting image: cinematography plays a large part in Vardimon's work. In the following sequence Song walks towards a static camera. Her face is projected, hugely enlarged, on to the cyclorama. The camera then explores her body, following the path of a marker pen with which she maps it out. Later she draws a house and windows on her belly, and other performers appear at the magnified windows and doors behind her. She smears the image on her body and the stage fills with smoke. The house is on fire. Panic.
Passages like these sail close to whimsy but Vardimon keeps a purposeful hand on the tiller. Sequences are launched as comedy, as when Luke Burrough lectures the audience on disease control and Mafalda Deville zooms around the stage as an out-of-control virus, and then suddenly turns violent as he assaults and crushes her. Combative relationships abound. Christine Gouzelis flirts with Tim Casson, whose romantic enthusiasm turns to terror when she begins to physically devour him, burying her head in his track-pants. A solo by Casson is violently interrupted by Burrough, who bursts on to the stage with a megaphone. 'I believe that a man should not dance in public,' he bellows, introducing a manic display of National Front-style flag-waving extracted from Park
Vardimon has a clear political and feminist agenda but a deft theatrical touch softens the agitprop edges. Her dance-making skills have developed over the years and so, vitally, has her preparedness to cut her work back to essentials. Tableaux unfold, flare for a moment, and are washed away on a tide of rhythmic, low-trajectory choreography. A beautiful, Bausch-like section from Lullaby sees the dancers in a rocking sea of feathers. While synthesising Vardimon's past work, Yesterday is also a meditation on the subject of memory, and as such brings a certain poignancy to the piece's bare-knuckle challenge.
THE ARGUS / Fri 5 Sept 08
Yesterday, Corn Exchange, Brighton Dome
By Rosy Hill
The Jasmin Vardimon Company celebrated their 10th anniversary on Tuesday with the retrospective production, Yesterday, revisiting breathtaking work from the ensemble's repertoire. It also delved into the memory of the Brighton-based choreographer, weaving together work from acclaimed past shows such as Lullaby, Park and Jusitia.
Multiple stories were performed by eight dancers in Vardimon's trademark athletic and emotional style, their bold physicality driven by a pulsing soundtrack, which led us on a playful, yet haunting journey into the past. Not one to shy away from serious issues, Vardimon scratched away the glossy veneer of society to expose a dark underbelly of racism, bigotry and justice.
In one sequence the national pride of a seemingly respectable young man descended into an aggressive, BNP-style rant. Equally dramatic was a scene of domestic abuse with a female dancer as a relentless attacker. The danger with a retrospective can be lack of continuity, but the sections flowed smoothly, aided by an eerily beautiful, repeated dance motif.
Ensemble pieces were separated by powerful and haunting duets, the most memorable of which showed a man with a lifeless body, symbolically struggling to revive his past. Creative use of multimedia and projections added another dimension and was most impressive when a house drawn on a dancer's stomach came alive as a giant projection, with others appearing at the window and walking through the front door.
The diverse soundtrack generated an intense atmosphere, moving from throbbing electronica to moments of musical comedy. Despite the occasionally complex narrative, Yesterday took the capacity audience on an imaginative and disjointed journey through memory and experience, utilising an incredible combination of technology and pure movement.
BRIGHTON MAGAZINE/ 03 Sept 08
Yesterday
All is dark and all is quiet as the low humdrumming sound of audience chit-chat slowly fades into a sort of foot shuffling - sweet unwrapping - water bottle finding - programme folding silence.
Then, in an instant the lights crash on, and then this happens…
A woman balances precariously clutching a fishing rod (fishing for memories?) and is held up both by her own legs, and the straining man sprawled beneath her as light-flashes strike the screen beyond and dancers roll and writhe.
Later another scrawls across her body with marker pen as the images are blown up onto the screen behind.
One man is shot, one waves his flag like a water cannon, while another battles a cancer-woman with a feather pillow.
All the time, screens of screaming light are drawn back and forth to hide and reveal the twisting turning dancers – strutting (in turn) all sassy, pained, arrogant, withdrawn and even downright sexy.
Never stopping and never boring, Jasmin Vardimon’s Yesterday, a damn fine rollercoaster ride of a production, does a lot more than it says on the tin - at least technically and does it all in just 75 minutes at the Corn Exchange, Brighton.
There can be few dance experiences that come closer to being a series artistic moments, at least artistic in the sense of conceptual or modern art - the kind that need neither canvas nor brush to achieve its goal - though it does have some intellectual sticking points that I will deal with in a minute.
The use of high levels of technology is often a prelude to a technical let-down in terms of dance quality, but here this is not the case.
These people can dance very well indeed. In this case, the technology does not overshadow the dance but adds to the sense of spectacle and enhances the performance overall.
At one stage a woman draws a house with marker pen on her naked stomach.
This is beamed via a small on stage camera onto huge ‘screen’ of white flexible strips that form a kind of back stage curtain.
A woman appears at the ‘window’ and others walk in out of the door to the strains of “…Ruby don’t take your love to town”.
As the woman with the pen starts to scrawl images of black fire and smoke intensely and viciously across her heaving stomach like a manic self-harming depressive, the house seems to ‘burn down’.
God-like, this ‘voodoo’ woman brings destruction and death down on the pretty girl at the window who is destroyed by the fire and despite fervent attempts to rescues her, she perishes in the flames.
Is this a metaphor for the ‘Ruby’ of the song, who somehow destroys herself in a seedy town world of sex and drugs, or doe she represent the dark side of song, an overprotective man who would rather see his girl burn on this earth than burn in the eternal hell of his overprotective middle-American Christian imagination?
It is moments like this that makes the production compelling viewing for dance aficionados and the general punter alike.