In the mid-'80s, Pina Bausch's Dance Theater Wuppertal, from Germany, began to make a racket on the international scene with exhaustive, often violent forays into sex and gender. One person paying special attention was Lloyd Newson. Unhappy with the way dance...
[more]In the mid-'80s, Pina Bausch's Dance Theater Wuppertal, from Germany, began to make a racket on the international scene with exhaustive, often violent forays into sex and gender. One person paying special attention was Lloyd Newson. Unhappy with the way dance emphasized technique at the cost of meaning, Newson founded DV8 Physical Theatre with Nigel Charnock, Michelle Richecoer, and Liz Rankin. As its name spells out, the mission of DV8 was to DE-VI-ATE -- both from the dance world norm of pretty, mute bodies coasting effortlessly through space and from society's expectations of human (especially male) behavior. Beginning with the gravity of the body and the awkward effort it requires of us, DV8 sees every sort of human experience as a potential source of drama.
Perhaps first among them, the homoerotic and homosocial. At the time of the company's creation, these were not entirely excluded from the dance canon -- Ted Shawn had an all-male company in the early part of the twentieth century and gay themes were emerging in Bill T. Jones' works. But, coming out of the sexual "deviance" of founder Newson, DV8 handled these issues more explicitly. Whether the cast was same-sex or mixed-gender, the performances were decidedly and shamelessly out at a time when the public discourse around AIDS was generally squeamish, even craven. Joining artists such as Keith Haring and, a bit later, Tony Kushner, Newson refused to make such things as public sex and the gay club scene invisible in the company's dances.
In most of DV8's pieces and dance films, dancers hurl themselves at one another at a violent clip. The movement draws from acrobatics and sport just as much as from contact improvisation techniques, and the performers use their voices as bravely as their bodies. In the tradition of Bausch, DV8 deploys repetition to dramatize difficult emotional states.
The use of high-risk physicality to till tender emotional terrain has come to typify DV8's work -- and to influence many groups that followed. Newson has made drama from the kind of questions he might have asked clients in his former career as a psychologist. 1995's "Enter Achilles" asks, what is the social fall-out when men deny their feelings? Why is the "unmanly" in men -- the soft, fey, bubbly -- so often feared and abhored? The dancers struggle mightily to embody -- or shed -- the ridiculous posturing of stereotypical masculinity that is asked of them. DV8 and Newson get to the core of our social and psychological make-up through simple words, bruised flesh, exposed bone.
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