Gretel: Forever, nothing spectacular

Meg Stuart (USA) & Philipp Gehmacher (Austria) MOŽDA ZAUVEK/ MAYBE FOREVER Production: Damaged Goods & Mumbling Fish Globalization, deconstruction, shipwreck, individualization… What about love? Where does it fit in? Could there be a place for it in the world of alienation, racing with time, online communication? Could it exist and could it be expressed through art? Through dance? The examination took place within Meg Stuarts’s and Philipp Gehmacher’s eighty-minute-long performance. Using a range of choreographic images in a quick rotation, the couple reminds the audience of failed attempts in finding a common language with other beings who were not there (or maybe they were, on other side of audience?) watching the performance. The announcement (wrongly) stated that the performance is as result of a five-day-long cooperation between one of the most important USA choreographers and a rising Austrian dancer. Many have, undoubtedly, found the confirmation in the frail, interrupted dance of the couple with very different sensibilities. However, it took two months of intensive work to create the dance which is seemingly so simple even looks amateurish at times. But, isn’t love exactly that? Is there room on stage for a closely controlled dance we saw at the opening? Two principles, two unique, incompatible yet harmonious approaches to dance presented some of the questions on the stage. Complementing each other – sometimes even with conflicting movements – Stuart and Gehmacher showed us well-known aspects of love – everyday struggle, wrestling, bitterness, passion, small things that make us happy, continuous attempts. I am sure there were people in the audience who wondered if love can be a topic of contemporary dance. And if it can, how is dance supposed to deal with it? Likewise, it could be said that it would have been better if Niko Hafkenscheid had played throughout the play creating the background to Meg Stuart’s dance who should have individually examined the importance of love in modern society and the possibility of its staging. But, dear ladies and gentlemen, love is not Sleeping Beauty. It is not a spectacle. And it most definitely is not perfect! It is deprived of anything spectacular, there are neither audio nor visual effects and it does not require a complicated and pretentious stage performance. The main postulates of the performance are a naïve dancing of two people, erasing importance of gender gap and contemplating the potential of their merging into one perfection. The two of them – the one constantly splitting apart, trying to teach communication to the other half. They are learning by the means of imitation, trying to build a common vocabulary which would help them unite and become eternal. Maybe forever! Forever as ideal, ultimate aim, the only aspiration. Dušan Milojević