Premiere November 24th 2012 at the Opéra National de Lorraine, Nancy, France. Peter Jacobsson, director of CCN Ballet de Lorraine, commissioned La Ribot with a new piece for the Ballet. Duration: 45min. Written and directed La Ribot Performers Ballet de Lorraine Dance collaboration Ruth Childs Rehearsals Christophe Baranger, Thomas Caley Stage design La Ribot, Victor Roy Music Clive Jenkins Costumes La Ribot Lighting design Eric Wurtz
Show / Dance / Theater
EEEXEEECUUUUTIOOOOONS !!! was commissioned by the Centre Chorégraphique National – Ballet de Lorraine in Nancy, France, and premiered on November 24th 2012. It involves nineteen dancers in nearly forty-five minutes of repetitive, energetic and masochistic dance, constantly laughing out loud. It’s a challenging work to watch, yet it’s also strangely exhilarating and at times very funny.
EEEXEEECUUUUTIOOOOONS !!! begins with the cast (variously clad in black sports gear, service industry clothing and items hinting at sado-masochist clothes) covering the stage floor in white cardboard sheets. They then perform some forty reiterations of individual movement sequences, eventually achieving a grand total of eight hundred and forty repetitions – or maybe “vexations” is the ideal term here, since Vexations, Erik Satie’s notorious 1893 exercise in “durational” piano-playing, is among La Ribot’s reference points.
The dancers’ individual sequences are choreographically determined in advance but their relationship to one another is open, so each performance is a new solution to a complex spatial riddle. Just two of the routines have an assigned space and they serve to anchor continuous, manic activity swirling around them. Upstage right, a male dancer in a harness hoists himself high on a rope and performs strenuous, ungainly aerial acrobatics. Downstage left, a male and a female dancer, working in turns, face the audience, crouch on all fours and fling themselves into a hyperactively undignified routine, waggling their knees and thrusting their pelvises back and forth in a double-headed parody of aerobics and “doggy-style” sex. Also working in shifts, the dancers roller the already-white walls of the set with white emulsion paint: an exercise in futile labour invoking that endlessly reinventable avant-garde trope, the monochrome painting.
The laughter in EEEXEEECUUUUTIOOOOONS !!! spawns a perverse contradiction: how can these tortuous exertions inspire such apparently inextinguishable pleasure? Mixing imagery of dance, physical exercise and sex with work, production and repetition, the piece augments a long critical tradition linking modernist rationalism and capitalist production with Sadeian violence. The overlapping of production, sexuality and the machinic is also widely present in the vocabulary of twentieth century dance and lurking in the shadows around EEEXEEECUUUUTIOOOOONS !!! we might just catch a fleeting glimpse of the Sacré du Printemps’ motifs of mechanical repetition and self-annihilation: dance as human sacrifice.