Alexandra Glanz

ADAM DANCING

The lightness of appearance: ‘Frans Poelstra, his dramaturge and Bach’

For those who as yet were in the dark as to what a dramaturge’s profession is all about – on Monday night at the Tanztheater International all the usual questions about the art of dance and its various spheres of meaning were elucidated. ‘Frans Poelstra, his dramaturge and Bach’ was such a brilliant lesson on theatrical events that this production by Frans Poelstra and Robert Steijn should be made compulsory in schools. It is certainly a class that has joy as an outcome – the joy of watching, that is.

And all this in spite of the fact that the audience at the Ballhof 2 in Hanover, with every seat booked, was confronted with an undressed dancer half the evening. Of course there are more titillating sights than a naked person on stage, one who moreover is no longer among the youngest in his profession. However, in the contemporary theatre of dance, it has been a long time since – in such a convincing and entertaining way – one has gone in search of the sensations aroused by a single shake of the bones.

Improvisation expert Frans Poelstra is the dancing Adam. The dramaturge Robert Steijn is the dramaturge getting the words to dance. Practically all evening long, he talks, philosophizes and brags about how Frans Poelstra, from being a policeman at one time, became a performer, and what part Bach played in this grotesque biography. For it was with the Goldberg Variations that the dancing career started of this 51-year old man, who ‘learnt everything in a dream’.

The audience experiences the nakedness – and the sniggers, shame and the comical this gives rise to. All and everything is ambiguity or even a polysemy here: Bach’s music, Poelstra’s dancing, Steijn’s comments. In the meantime innocence takes a knock, and the two capricious Dutchmen take the mickey out of their own guilelessness. God created the world in six days, Bach wrote his Goldberg Variations in eleven days, and these two need two months and a half to get their performance together. Why so long? ‘Because of our doubts!’

After well over an hour, dramaturge Steijn explains that they now need to see eye to eye as to how the evening will continue, resulting in a five minute ‘toilet stop’. Then Poelstra returns clad in pale apricot dungarees,  donning the same duo look as his stage colleague. And on goes the jolly nonsense again. With a pseudo-scientific discourse, the subject of which is how to develop a dance relationship with things like a balloon, a rope and baking paper. Absurd solos that seem entirely suitable for home use.

We are now more than halfway the Tanztheater programme. Saturday this 21st edition of the festival will end with the Belgian ‘Peeping Tom’. The stark naked Dutchman has set a quality standard.