THREE STARS

 

Jasmin Vardimon has brought her contemporary dance company to Oxford several times over the past decade, and audiences will have got to know her uncompromising, sometimes harrowing, style. Freedom is her latest work, and is, she told me, about a wide rage of aspects of the concept. In a sense Vardimon seems to define freedom by what it is not. “We found ties and restrictions in conventions, religion, codes of behaviour, physical disabilities and gravity, which ties us to the ground. Above all we found restrictions of fear.”

As usual, her work is exciting and stimulating, but it is difficult to penetrate her thinking on this theme, and to relate what we see on the stage to specific ideas of freedom or the lack of it.

The set, by Guy Bar-Amotz and Vardimon herself, is very intriguing. We are in a sort of jungle created out of plastic. Huge white fronds dangle from above, while a wall of brownish vegetation forms a backcloth. At the opening there is a huge pile of leaves, covering, perhaps, a fallen statue or idol. Dancer Julia Robert Pares climbs up slowly, and it begins to move. It’s the rest of the cast, who then disappear as it collapses — presumably through a trap in the stage.

Now powerful music blasts out, blowing dancers this way and that. A woman tied up in green garden hose breaks free, an incongruous ballerina in a white tutu writhes her arms like a departing Odette, these elongated but the flexible white tubes which she manipulates. A woman stiff and straight, is impersonating a surf board, and standing on her back a dancer surfs through the jungle. There is a passionate duet, and another dancer, wrapped in a sheet with his woman, emerges to distribute karate kicks around the cast. These seemingly unconnected episodes flow beautifully one from another, and are terrific to watch, but what do they tell us about freedom, or Vardimon’s feelings on the subject? Not a lot.