deadset

First, she’s outside it. She walks around it. Then she enters the box. The shifting lights of producers Adrien M and Caire B’s Hakanaï seem to alternately embody freedom and liberation. Choreography realised with vigorous finesse at the hands (and feet and everything else) of Akiko Kajihara, the performance is compelling and captivating, without coming off as mere entertainment. The restrained, almost monastic, steps of the dancer as she circles the constructed box, a cube some three or so metres tall, audience orbiting it in the round, is carried on as she enters, then merges into the dance proper, all of which seamlessly carries the interpretative metaphors of the act.

Within the cube, her motions are synchronised with the movement of light on the planes of the box, each in turn unified with the beat and pulse of the music, electric-sonic in its execution. Punches, tai-chi gestures, bursts of physicality, stomp to twist to arch. At first, bars of light raise, jail-like, as our dancer realises her prison, venturing alternately to escape, back to re-imprisonment, from mastery, into loss of mastery, a dancer-composer, commanding the reactions of her environment, always controlled by the limitations of the box. Not to mention puppeteered by the producers beyond its bounds.

On the surface, is the beauty of the dance. The spectacle of the light show and the interactivity of the box. The harmony between body, flow, dance, human form, with light, technology, surface and ripple. Deeper, is a oneness, and a quantum fluidity of movement as energy vibrating through space, forming place, shaping time, embodying animate and inanimate alike.

Therein lies the inevitable contemporary issue: man versus tech. As much as our dancer masters her technological powers in her interactions with the box, she is always (traumatically) contained within its limits. Though she can flow, the box remains rigid. The work of Adrien M and Claire B moves in the same current as trends in popular scientific thought, merging the scientific and the artistic in a palatable and entertaining micro-ballet. Is this oneness, though, necessarily as deep as the performance wishes to convey?

Deeper, is a oneness, and a quantum fluidity of movement as energy vibrating through space, forming place, shaping time, embodying animate and inanimate alike.

We, as spectators, are doing some complex gazing during this performance of oneness,
orchestrated by two French producers, and enacted by an East Asian dancer. Judging from the credits, the cast of dancers includes others, though the Prague performance was expressively and energetically handled by Kajihara alone. If it wasn’t for the box/prison metaphor in play, the meaning here would shift from the colonial. Kajihara may have been born in Japan, never a French territory, though this doesn’t reduce a sense of japonisme about the work. It isn’t clear if this is a commentary the producers wish to make.

The focus, seemingly, is elsewhere, and more tech-based, more metaphysical. Even the adoption of a Japanese title borrows an exotic mystique, the word itself meaning, according to the producers’ programme, impermanent, fragile, evanescent, transitory, and fleeting. It’s interesting to contemplate how much of a contribution Kajihara had on the work’s composition if at all.

It would, however, be unfair to say the work seems exploitative. Whatever the producers want to say, and whatever the work itself says without meaning to, is just as intriguing as its more overt theme of a lonely humanity in the great big universe. All in all, maybe it’s just not that deep. Until, of course, it is.

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Lunchmeat is a forward-thinking electronic music and arts festival hosted annually in Prague, Czech Republic. It attracts industry thinkers, critics, writers, and performers as well DJs, producers and rave enthusiasts. Hakanaï was performed at Divadlo Archa on Wednesday 27.9.23.