Deborah Colker's Knot is a full evening work that falls into two distinct halves, but with one constant theme desire. Her Brazilian company gave a thrilling performance of the piece, created last year, which is by turn shocking, exciting and at times extremely beautiful.
"We are born desiring," she says, "and spend our lives trying to learn how to deal with it". There are of course many kinds of desire, but Colker's preoccupation is clearly with the sexual. The dancers are dressed in what at first appear to be very skimpy costumes, though these have in fact been painted on to rather staid flesh-coloured leotards. But if she has chickened out over the costumes, she has certainly gone full pelt into the dancing. Curiously, for a work made by a woman, it is mainly the men who dominate and manipulate. The first half begins with what looks like a tree of ropes 120 of them hanging from above and wound together at the base. In a scene straight from a bondage movie, a man ties a woman up in a harness, her arms pulled behind her head and then fixed at her waist. One foot is secured in a loop, and she is hoisted awkwardly above the stage.
From here on, different combinations of men and women pull away or towards each other, using a series of red ropes to bind themselves into position, the ropes often biting into the dancers' flesh. It's an unashamedly sexy piece, but it contains choreography of very high quality, with a long adagio section that simply exudes desire.
After the interval the ropes are gone, and replaced by a huge perspex box with ladders inside and outside at each corner. Here we are dealing with confinement, with desire frustrated by separation, and with a lot of acrobatic scaling of the ladders as the performers dance outside or within the box, or even, dangerously, along the tops of its walls, their reflections adding to the complexity of a clever work that would be sharper if shorter.
"I believe there was a change in the physical relation among the dancers afterwards", says Colker. I'm not surprised.
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