With the British dance legend at the helm, this year’s themes ranged from quantum gravity to slightly muted geopolitics
The most memorable performance in the opening days of this year’s Venice Dance Biennale had barely any dance in it at all. Italian choreographer Andrea Salustri’s Invisible is built around movement, but it’s movement of light, air, water and sound waves, with Salustri and co-creator Alice Rende as shadowy figures conducting the elements. They brew up storms like Zeus and Poseidon, with flashing veins of light, sounds of pummelling rain (in fact small drips and bubbles amplified by powerful microphones) and an enormous amount of billowing smoke that ultimately whips itself into a spinning tornado.
Salustri, who won the Italian callout to create a new work for this year’s biennale, is a circus artist and philosophy graduate, and he is also a choreographer – a definition so much wider than one who devises dance. This year marks the 20th dedicated dance festival in Venice (dance was previously seen as part of the theatre or music programmes here until 1999, since when it has been an annual, then biennial, and now annual feature of Venice’s arts bonanza). In a talk to mark this anniversary, current artistic director Wayne McGregor was joined by four former directors to discuss their aims for the event. The question of “what dance is” kept arising as the ongoing line of inquiry, a question “so ordinary that it is still necessary somehow”, said choreographer Marie Chouinard.
A new film, Life Lines, put together by McGregor and filmmaker Ravi Deepres, compiles archive clips from festivals past, showing that the range of dance here has been vast and multifarious, from the fairly conventional to the theatrically wild. There’s clearly no single story of contemporary dance’s development, and McGregor’s theme for this year’s festival is Time Does Not Exist. Influenced by physicist Carlo Rovelli and the theory of quantum gravity, his is not a linear view of time, and without doubt, in dance (and in life), we carry our embodied pasts constantly into the present. That’s no more evident than in Soa Ratsifandrihana’s piece Fampitaha, Fampita, Fampitàna (meaning “comparison, transmission, rivalry” in Malagasy, the language of Madagascar, from where the choreographer is from). It’s a piece about living in the diaspora and concerned with the sometimes joyful, sometimes painful, memories that link back home – especially the memories stored in our bodies, in songs, stories and dance steps. It’s a gentle piece, conversational between the three dancers and fabulous guitarist Joël Rabesolo, in the sense that like many conversations it meanders, then touches on the profound, then gets self-absorbed, connects again, tails off. But it has its moments.
