Review by Jennie Macfie
Jasmin Vardimon Company: 7734
18 May 2011 in Dance & Drama, Highland, Showcase
Empire Theatre, Eden Court, Inverness, 17 May 2011
IT IS impossible for those of us whose family members have not been in concentration camps to understand what it feels like.
Lucky? Maybe. Jasmin Vardimon’s 7734 shows us what we are missing – the survivor guilt, the endless return to the horror with the impossible hope that this time, somehow, it will happen differently. The constant worrying about how and why it happened and whether and when history will repeat itself. Complacency is not an option.
7734 (photo Tristram Kenton)
Like her compatriot Hofesh Schecter, Vardimon explores the nature of humanity and inhumanity. What is it that makes us human? Schecter explores our animal nature, but Vardimon turns her dancers into puppets, machines, automata, hapless creatures of their social environment, jerking in uncontrollable spasms, flowing like an incoming tide, flopping like abandoned dolls.
Vardimon and her company of dancers show us in relentless images of suffering, pain and despair, sometimes half-seen in shadows and even more powerful as a result, interspersed with a hedonistic beach scenario drawn from a thousand television commercials which required the dancers to use spoken dialogue.
This was far less successful – though the company are exceptional dancers, they are not actors. One would not expect Colin Firth to execute a perfect pirouette….
The imaginative set used heaps of clothes, which were constantly flopped onto, scrabbled among, piled into dunes, raised on lines, all the while recalling uncomfortable images from the past and the present, the waste of people and things. Red cloth spills viscerally from hacked plastic sacks in one of the most uncomfortable moments of the night.
We’re conditioned by Hollywood to expect closure and a happy ending, of sorts – even Schindler’s List focuses in the end on those who survived.
Vardimon’s message is that in life there is no guarantee of a happy ending. Civilisation, society, humanity, they’re all a thin veneer and all it takes to blow them away is a sudden gust of the chill wind which is always blowing out there, somewhere.
Say the word ‘concentration camp’ and we think of Dachau, Belsen, Auschwitz. But there were others before and after; Guantanamo is still operating. The truth is not comfortable, but it is important.
© Jennie Macfie, 2011
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At the end of the first half I felt this had been a strong of piece of work with some weaknessses, but worth seeing. I was surprised to find there was a second half–it seemed everything had been said that needed to be said. And I found that second half to be close to dance as torture porn–or dance as lecture–rather like Michael Haneke’s repellent film ‘Funny Games’. I felt patronised.