The ragged fallow land from which four dancers are growing is pale from time or the sun. Balls of moss and lichen make the square dance floor in the middle of the Muffathalle a paradise for feet. In Louise Vanneste’s “Earths”, invited to the Tanzwerkstatt Europa (TWE), they don’t get anywhere for a long time. Paula Almiron, Amandine Laval, Léa Vinette, Castelie Yalombo wear long-sleeved underwear and the inward gaze of those drunk with sleep, feel into their stance like yogis or carefully test the fluffy mobility of the botany – which creates its own little show on the ground. Loud crackling hangs over the play and feel field, which is illuminated like a terrarium. This is how the noise of our world must sound to grasses and microorganisms that we otherwise carelessly tread on.
The environmentally-conscious Belgian choreographer focuses on them. The sparse movements of the dancers, which initially seemed rusty, are due to listening to what is crawling and fleeing on the floor. But that produces individual blooms. If one just tilts its head, the next one will twitch like a bird that will soon be spreading its wings for the first time. The third holds her squirming fingers in the air as if stroking tender willow leaves, while dancer number four lets her body wriggle after the raised arm feeler like a plant growing in fast motion.
The atmosphere is vaguely spooky
Not all of this happens at the same time, and most of it is at least one level of abstraction away from flat embodiment. Whether the movement material was allowed to happen, as Vanneste explains, is of course difficult to verify. The atmosphere is quite special, hypersensitive, contemplative, even vaguely uncanny. But it’s built that way, layer by layer. The filigree moves are most interesting where they oscillate between mindfulness practice and machine-like. But soon you get the hang of it, maybe you’re still pondering about the increasing mobility of these hybrid creatures and why one of the most powerful suddenly fell to the ground again. And longs more and more for a disruptive fire or a foreign object in or above the moss, for something that gives this increasingly arbitrary contact with the earth a new twist
Further performances: Frédérick Gravel “Fear and Greed”, Thursday, August 11, 8.30 p.m., Muffathalle, admission 20/12 euros, www.jointadventures.netand Final Lecture & Party, Fri., August 12, 8.30 p.m., Muffathalle, free admission with a ticket (box office)