Article by:
Vanessa Keys
Over the years, Javier de Frutos has been censored by the BBC for staging a show with a deformed pope and pregnant nuns, scored a full length ballet with the Pet Shop Boys and once received a review that called his work “the biggest piece of crap ever seen”. Never one to shy away from controversy, the Venezuelan-born choreographer’s latest stunt is staging his own death for the sake of art, complete with a professionally-written obituary and a gaggle of bereaved dancers. Appropriately, this new work is called Fiction, and is the second half of double bill Life, the new BalletBoyz show at Sadler’s Wells that orbits around life and death, light and dark, yin and yang.
As always with de Frutos, there’s the risk that provocation will teeter into self indulgence, but the choreographer’s shrewd storytelling skills are asserted from the first scene. Bright stage lights bring into focus 10 lean, lithe dancers – the entirety of the BalletBoyz ensemble – chatting and stretching at the barre before a dance rehearsal is due to begin. Suddenly, they’re interrupted: their beloved choreographer Javier de Frutos has been struck by a shard of glass and is dead.
A hyperbolic mix of staccato orchestral music, voiceovers, love ballads and jaunty piano notes accompanies the dancers as they descend into anarchy. There’s a raw, almost uncomfortable physicality in the way the dancers contort their bodies as they throw themselves across the floor, sometimes using the metal barre as a way to play at death. BalletBoyz are one of today’s genuine ensemble companies, and de Frutos has used their chemistry to his and their advantage, delivering choreography so effortless that it looks entirely improvised.
That’s certainly not the case during the first half of the double bill. Rabbit, Swedish choreographer and filmmaker Pontus Lidberg’s ode to childhood, is so wonderfully precise, so cleverly comedic that it’s akin to watching a dozen wind-up toys set off at the same time. Lidberg opens his narrative with a young man dancing with someone in a rabbit mask, both dressed in public schoolboy attire, all long socks and shrunken sleeves. As more rabbits roll onto the stage and loyalties shift and change, questions around acceptance, loneliness and conformity seep into the air. There’s lots to interpret here.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though: Lidberg’s slapstick choreography had the audience in fits of giggles and gives the BalletBoyz the perfect
environ in which to showcase their agility and athleticism. Rabbit isn’t as stirring as Fiction but together, this is a powerhouse double bill that reminds us of the absurdity of life.
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