Tanzquartier Wien

Anyone who walks on a stage to present something, not only brings what they have learned and rehearsed along with a performative quality into the equation but, fortunately, themselves as well. The beautiful mixing ratios that can develop in an interplay between specification and idiosyncrasy are celebrated in On the Cusp in a wonderfully cheerful manner and with subtle humour.

At the beginning, the charmingly heterogeneous Cullbergbaletten ensemble from Sweden demonstrate the great variety of different ways in which one can jump rope: euphorically or tiredly, by exhausting oneself or in energy-saving mode, sideways or in an entirely orthodox manner, in time or resisting any rhythm. And all the while, the incessantly rotating red jumping ropes keep whistling and whirring softly. On the Cusp: a sports piece. Artificial rain comes down on the widescreen monitor in the background (it will pour on the performers’ faces as well later on), the group movement ends, silence falls. As the music sets in, announcing a new sequence, the group realigns itself along a stylised grey boxed wall – an abstract hybrid of a row of lockers and a climbing wall. A tangle of humanity is forming as if in slow motion, rolling against, on and over the wall in (what only appears to be) a chaotic manner. Artistry and dance precision soon emerge from the disorder. The synthetic hymns supplied by Planningtorock provide the production with subtle drama and bass-intensive thrust: electronic minimal brass in dynamising loops.

Choreographer Ian Kaler orchestrates the playful struggle between collective and individual forces, between non-simultaneity and synchronicity in a sequence of scenes that distils contemporary dance from everyday, apparently randomly executed gestures. The unconventional beauty of his spatial and movement arrangements culminates in a kind of action-dancing sequence: dancers play-wrestle in pairs to delayed beats in a way that suggests a friendly clapping game rather than actually hitting the “opponent”. The assemblage of movements borrowed from pop culture includes headbanging, street dance and hip-hop bouncing – the dancers slide across the stage on their lower legs, bellies, arms or backs, they bounce as if in a rap video and crawl on the floor in military-camp style. The boundaries between genres and domains become blurred, there are no limits to the manifold associations presented by way of video images, musical digressions as well as sound recordings of children’s voices and street noise. The choreography radiates between realism and stylisation, alluding to various dance jargons and shattering them almost instantly. The vertex or pivot mentioned in the title may refer to this crossing of genre boundaries.

It’s only consistent to retreat into regression at this point; the performers develop ticks, seemingly mimicking the facial expressions and movements emerging from the excess energies of the children who are now present in the video images. At first barely noticeably, then increasingly systematic, the dancers begin to twitch and quiver, they fidget, shake, grimace, make soft noises, breathe intermittently: the stage, a humanimal park. The shrill, authoritative sound of a whistle finally calls the players to order, to stop the ongoing action, to exit the stage. Apparently unobserved, the children on the mute screen continue to do as they please in silence. On the Cusp is a plea for childish exhaustion and self-renunciation, for the beauty of purposeless excess.

Stefan Grissemann is the editor of weekly news magazine profil’s arts section. He teaches at the Filmakademie in Vienna and at the University of Applied Sciences Vienna. His book publications include a study of Ulrich Seidl’s oeuvre as well as the first biography of Austrian-American B-movie director Edgar G. Ulmer.

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