Dance festival “Colours” shows highlights from London culture, among other things

When it comes to failures, the railways are currently completely reliable. Last Saturday, catenary damage in Stuttgart’s main train station caused chaos and stranded trains on the outskirts of the Ländle. The dance world, which is coming to the “Colours” festival from all over Europe these days, had to be picked up somewhere between Mannheim and Karlsruhe and transported to the theater on the Pragsattel. Only Alexander Whitley’s crew had no problem: the company is one of the two festival attractions to come from London. And from there the choreographer took the plane with three dancers, three technicians and a producer.

A meeting just before the performance? No problem. 42-year-old Whitley orders a beer and the conversation immediately ends up with Boris Johnson. “It’s a disaster,” says Whitley, “it’s all driving society into even deeper divisions.” Not only the artist speaks, but also the political scientist. He completed a degree while working: “I wanted to perceive the world differently, understand it and be able to analyze it beyond artistic debate.”

Whitley dances longer than he can remember: “My parents say I must have been under three years old.” Born in the north of England in 1980, he was drawn to the Royal Ballet School (“an ambiguous experience”) to train, then to his first engagements. Before he dares to make a radical cut, he turns to the contemporary, primarily to explore the interfaces between AI and choreography. This is exactly what makes Whitley’s work so interesting: it opens up new spaces and a performative thinking that points beyond the body.

A clever move that the festival curators Meinrad Huber and Eric Gauthier secured Whitley’s latest opus “Anti-Body” as a German premiere. The hour-long act ignites fireworks in black and white and is reminiscent of the high-frequency impulse generation in neural networks. Three dancers create the effect. They wear motion capture suits and sensors that communicate with specially coded software. Your movement triggers the action, creates light sculptures and LED fans, spots and dots and galactic vortices. The artificial structures are caught and reflected by transparent screens in front of and behind the performers. The trio act side by side, but their real dance partners are the fluid forms, artificial revenants and ghostly misty avatars that each creates for himself: with swinging arms, spinning legs, lowering torso, leaps and spread poses.

Open detailed view

The motor skills of the dancers, who immerse themselves in their actions as if in a meditative trance, drive “Anti-Body” forward. Whitley creates a hyper-aesthetic vision of total loneliness: the inhospitable nature of the brave new screen world and its sensory overload characterize an increasingly digitally overgrown society. On the other hand, the IT-triggered exceeding of physical limits, which results from the interaction between man and machine, is tempting. In the “Colours” portfolio, Whitley’s position has USP qualities because his peers adhere to the primacy of analogue. Rituals are very much in vogue, for example in “Salema Revisited”, Andonis Foniadakis’ homage to his Greek homeland and the interplay between dance and music, hugging and outdoing. The same applies to Marcos Morau’s surreal “Sonoma” fantasy, which works with Catalan touches from the costume to the movement direction. Dada Masilo’s “The Sacrifice”, which was last seen at the Festspielhaus Hellerau and is currently being shown at “Colours”, also belongs in the round of rituals. The South African choreographer climbs into the floods of tradition and transposes the “Sacre” myth into traditional dance idioms, which at times produces a somewhat muddled result.

“We have to ask contemporary questions, also in dance – why else should public money flow?”

On the other hand, Botis Seva’s “BLKDOG” sharpens his scenario. The production, which will also have its German premiere at the end of the week, is the alternative to Whitley’s pixel pointillism. At Seva, seven guys in hoodies sit on the half-dark stage, children’s verses trickle from the off, the voices just outgrown the diaper age. Seconds later, “BLKDOG” unleashes a hip-hop iconoclasm that formulates the desperation of an entire generation: those sidelined youngsters for whom violence is a communication tool, neglect is the only reliable companion and the clique is family substitutes. Seva, who made the piece in retrospect of depressive episodes and the disturbing experience of fatherhood for him, is a discovery: the thirty-year-old combines street dance with club and contemporary elements and thus delivers the dense description of an urban sociotope that corresponds to the classism of the Urban and educational planning holds up a mirror to social failure.

It’s no coincidence that “BLKDOG” and “Anti-Body” come from London, the British hotspot dance industry. From the continent, the British subsidy system is often reviled as an incubator for audience-attractive productions that are nurtured with infusions alien to art. Alex Whitley sees the risk of self-censorship: “As an artist, it can happen that you squint at what attracts viewers.” But at the same time, thanks to the funding guidelines, his generation has its finger on the pulse of the times: “We have to ask contemporary questions, including in dance – why else should public money flow?” Problem awareness instead of profiling, on this humus the currently most exciting dance creations thrive.