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London (UK), 7 February 2004 Blush (Ultima Vez and Woven Hand)
by Judith Mackrell  Blush is an old-fashioned word - a word associated with startled heroines, shy lovers and hidden shame. It is a word associated with secrets. But in Wim Vandekeybus's show, first performed in 2002, nothing is withheld, or forbidden. During its two-hour anatomisation of love and desire, sensations are pursued and taboos broken with hell-bent recklessness. There is a woman who rides herself to orgasm astride her snoring, unwitting lover; another who threatens herself with a chainsaw, and a third who appears to drink the remains of a liquidised live frog. There are men who dream of gang rape and grievous bodily harm and who rummage brutally around the body of a dead woman. In between, the dancers perform punishing routines that dash them repeatedly against the floor or against each other's pummelled flesh. They also launch periodic assaults on the audience - eyeballing selected victims in the stalls, making crude enquiries about their sex lives and begging for money. The steady rustle of exiting refusniks is presumably part of the desired effect. Though Blush sounds like nothing more than a string of shock tactics, there is a sprinkling of artful strategy. Moments where Vandekeybus layers live music, dance, film and spoken monologue create an ecstatic intensity, as does his use of the Orpheus myth as a symbol of lost love and unsatisfied desire. In one very beautiful section, a woman clings to the back of her lover as he blindly stalks the stage - half a dozen other men shadowing them in ritual attendance. As this Euridice speaks of all the mortal sensations she will never again experience, the ravenous demands expressed in the rest of the show acquire a reflected poignancy. But Wandekeybus is too impatient to let such moments resonate, too eager to cram in more stuff, and the dramatic returns diminish fast. Long before the evening was over, I had lost the will to think or imagine. It wasn't Orpheus' underworld Vandekeybus had taken us to but a theatrical purgatory of pointless excess. 2 stars (out of five)
by Zoe Anderson  "You didn't read the reviews," a dancer tells the audience early on in Blush, "or you wouldn't be here." Well, no. Wim Vandekeybus's production for Ultima Vez is two hours of running about and ranting, with bouts of frog-juggling and simulated sex. The frog turns up early. A woman comes on with it dangling from one hand, twitching and apparently real. A man takes it from her, pops it into a blender, then gives her the juice to drink. It's sleight of hand, but I worry for the frog. Blush is dance theatre at its most self-indulgent. The subject is, loosely, love and its effect on the body; Vandekeybus promises references to the Orpheus myth, but they must be deeply disguised. The dancers were chosen for their recklessness as performers, but that only means their readiness to scream, strip or be humiliated. We're deep in Pina Bausch territory, though without Bausch's strokes of theatrical imagination. One woman breaks a glass, then proclaims with increasing satisfaction that she'll never wake up, never get a tattoo on her groin, never. Another woman asks for money from the audience, promising to dance or sing in return. Someone in the front row, thus bullied, finally gives her something; the other dancers line up to glare reproachfully at him. Vandekeybus trained in film, and tends to put it into his dance works. For Blush, the screen is made of elastic strips. Dancers can dive right through it, vanishing, then reappearing on screen, swimming underwater. It could be striking, and the filmed effects of light and water are rather beautiful. But Vandekeybus is clumsily determined to repeat his effects. Every on-screen splash is set to a cymbal crash. The dancers keep jumping in and out, giving you plenty of time to see how the illusion works. Once even Vandekeybus is thoroughly bored of the water scenes, the dancers pile blocks in front of the screen and settle down to rant. A woman runs around grunting, while the others throw biscuits at her. One man begs to be buggered with the banana he has ready peeled. Another strips and trots about the stage, genitals flopping; later a woman strips, and is slapped. There's plenty of on-stage abuse. A man holds one of the women down, pushing a microphone into her mouth while a second man thrusts his hand between her legs. The dancers leave off shouting to run around the stage, sometimes jumping or turning cartwheels. They shin up thick poles and build towers with the blocks. More film sequences show squealing pigs, bamboo groves, lots of frogs. The music for Blush is performed by David Eugene Edwards and his Goth-country-rock band. At Sadler's Wells, and at several other touring dates, the band play live. It's shocking how little impact that has: the band grind on, the dancers scream on, more or less independently.
1 star (out of five)
   
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