With their mission to create “circus on a human scale”, Canadian company The 7 Fingers have always veered close to theatre. For Triptyque, they have invited three choreographers to create work for them – with mixed results.
Marie Chouinard’s Anne & Samuel (for guest dancer Anne Plamondon and company director Samuel Tétreault) is both the most dance-based and the least satisfying. The performers are on crutches – limb extensions which they use like prods and antennae as well as for support – and move through a ritualised bondage scenario, in which Tétreault unknots Plamondon’s suspended body and the pair engage in a mantis-like mating dance that ends in a tight, tantric coupling. The crutches-and-crotches arc is less interesting than it sounds: the material is weaker than the ideas.
Victor Quijada’s Variations 9.81 has the opposite, though preferable, problem: the ideas are weaker than the material. On arrays of wooden pommels set atop movable rods, five équilibristes (hand-balancers) perform gravity-defying handstands, legs stretching skywards or pitching at vertiginous angles. It looks amazing – they appear to be balancing on pinheads – but only one scene, in which a woman keeps toppling over when she’s upright, but comes into her own when upside down, really touches the heart.
For Marcos Morau’s Nocturnes, a woman lies on the cusp between waking and sleeping on a large white bed. The others emerge from beneath the bed, and there follows a montage of scenes with all the hallucinatory quality of lucid dreaming, to music ranging from shivers of Chopin to woozy jazz. When the performers swing from ropes or the bed rises like a magic carpet, we feel the giddy sensations of flying and falling. When they run on the spot, suspended in mid-air, it feels like those dreams when we struggle to move.
Bodies with fish heads invade the stage, a unicyclist spins surreally by, and snowflakes fall upon the bed like fantasies. This captivating piece finally gets the right blend of dance and circus, theatre and spectacle.