XSIGHT! PERFORMANCE GROUP
The leaders in the movement toward more theatrical dance have been German practitioners of Tanztheater (dance-theater). Started by Pina Bausch of the Wuppertal Dance Theater in West Germany’s industrial Ruhr Valley, Tanztheater creates a theater based on dancers. Although the dancers sometimes speak, their talk is not the polished prose of playwrights but daily speech distorted and re-formed. Its language does not follow conventional conversational patterns but repeats and overlaps like steps in a dance. Tanztheater deals in primal emotions and situations–rape, the failure of community–while maintaining a dispassionate clarity.
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The members of Xsight!–Brian Jeffery, Tim O’Slynne, and Mary Ward–acknowledge that their increasingly theatrical dances have been influenced by Tanztheater. “We were already making theatrical dances,” says O’Slynne. “When we were in Europe touring, we saw Tanztheater. It confirmed for us that we were headed in the right direction. You could say it encouraged us to follow our own instincts.” The first dance they created after seeing Tanztheater was the very popular The Pope’s Toe, which attacked the rigidity of the Catholic church, showing priests as thinly veiled homosexuals who oppressed women’s spiritual lives. The Pope’s Toe was fueled by indignation and anger, and occasionally spilled over into needless vulgarity. Its pungent diagnosis of Catholicism’s failings as a conflict between differing sexual directions reflects a recurring Xsight! theme. Its wild, loopy humor kept the anger and the analysis alike in check.
In the most fully realized section, Klotzer keeps demanding of Sapien: “Kiss me.” Sapien walks away, but Klotzer follows her. When Sapien leaves the stage, Klotzer turns to the rest of the dancers, imploring them to kiss her. In variation after variation, Klotzer begs for kisses. A mob of dancers cluster around her, and then she breaks free. The dancers sit on white chairs, legs spread, as Klotzer jumps from chair to chair, placing her feet between their legs. Feeling the urgency of her need for affection, we are reminded of the origin of promiscuity. Later Klotzer and Sapien are reunited, and after they leave the stage a different dancer turns to the other dancers and says “Kiss me”–and the cycle begins again. Klotzer’s compelling performance and the formal inventiveness of the choreography combine to give a new insight into sexuality.
