Published 3 may 2012 at 13:21 in Swedish newspaper SVD / Svenska Dagbladet

Void fills with meaning in playful melancholia

MDT, Skeppsholmen. Dance: Nothing’s for something Concept, direction: Heine Avdal, Yukiko Shinozaki. Sound: Fabrice Moinet. Light etc: Hans Meijer. Graphics: Brynjar Åbel Bandlien

Balloon-dance[1] takes on a completely new, considerably more poetic meaning after the performance Nothing’s for something. Here nothing is what it seems to be, and still this fascinating installation of objects, bodies, animations and sound is a highly concrete staging of a room in motion in front of a seated audience.

The duo Avdal & Shinozaki similarly to many performing artists have liberated themselves from the theatre-space and created site-specific work in offices and hotel rooms in their series Field works. When they now return to the theatre it is to employ its illusion making and codes in order to uncover what is beyond the visible. A philosophical idea moulded through a series of playful, beautiful and melancholic spatial transformations that ultimately deal with our transience.

Everything begins and ends with light on the audience, the co-creators. The room itself seems to be breathing, but the sound is interrupted by thunderous Strauss-waltz. To An der schönen, blauen Donau a baroque theatre of lustrous grey fabric appears. The set pieces are suspended by sturdy balloons that glide away, duck for beams in the ceiling and pull the fabric along with a rustling sound. These dancing shapes of fabric, that come up close to the audience, hatch people who are then engulfed again in an equally illusive way.

Sound and light create gaps between internal and external images. The room becomes the main character, rather than the people behind it. Like a menacing gigantic wave the fabric sweeps everyone with it. Left behind are sharp shadows, like cave paintings or crime scene markings – and they too are in motion.

The long finale is exceptional. Into the dusk seven white, glowing balloons float and create a space that includes even us. Driven by small propellers these remote-controlled objects seem full of life, as were they souls adrift from the earth – and at the same time familiar vessels on the Stockholm sky. On the back wall the silhouette of Gamla Stan[2] comprised of white lines is growing. Life is heard in the distance: telephone signals, cars, voices, birds. The theatre space expands towards the world and the time outside. But it is a man made reality – that with its flowing technology fills void with meaning.
 
Anna Ångström Dance editor SvD
08-13 56 14 anna.angstrom@svd.se
 
7-8 May Fieldworks office is performed in MDT:s office.
 
Translated by Mariana Suikkanen Gomes, June 2012.