May B

ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre, Auckland

09/03/2011 - 12/03/2011

Auckland Arts Festival 2011

Production Details


"This piece based on the writings of Samuel Beckett, whose work contradictsin its theatrical movement and atmosphere the physical and aesthetic performance of a dancer, has enabled us to lay the grounds for a secret decyphering of our most intimate, hidden and ignored gestures.

To succeed in unveiling the tiny or spectacular gestures of the many unnoticeable and unconspicious lives in which waiting and "not quite still"stillness create a void, a huge nothingness, a silent space filled with the hesitations. When Beckett’s characters yearn for stillness, they cannot help moving; be it a little or a lot, they move.

In this essentially theatrical work, the point, for us, was less to develop words and speech than blown-up form of movement, thus seeking the meeting point between movement applied to theater on the one hand, and dance and choreographic language on the other.

– Maguy Marin

Dancers:  Ulises Alvarez, Romain Bertet, Teresa Cunha, Léa Helmstädter, Mayalen Otondo,  Jeanne Vallauri, Matthieu Perpoint, Grégory Robardet, Ennio Sammarco, Vania Vaneau

1 hour 30 mins

Intensely disciplined performance

Review by Bernadette Rae 10th Mar 2011

Maguy Marin’s landmark work, celebrating 30 feted years of continuous performance, begins with the sculptured forms of its ten dancers, posed in dusty alabaster-like desertion, being slowly brought to life by a solitary male voice in a quietly beautiful rendition of The Organ Grinder, from Schubert’s Winterreise cycle.

In the last lonely scene, when all but one has trudged and grunted, hissed and cackled, fought and struggled and spat their ways to journey’s end, another single male voice, in maddening repetition and far from lovely, accompanies the final fade.

Thirty years ago May B shocked with its new definition of what dance might be.

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Precise poetics, minute attention to detail

Review by Alys Longley 10th Mar 2011

It is a funny thing to be reviewing Maguy Marin’s work May B, which is nearing its 635th performance since its debut in Paris in 1981. I think of how this work must live in the hearts and minds of audiences all over the world, about the hundreds if not thousands of reviews, in a multiplicity of languages, that precede this one, of the number of dancers who carry this movement in their cells – decades of performers of the work, but also audience members like the ones I talked to last night who commented that they wanted to dance in May B. It is as if the clarity and life of Marin’s movement vocabulary and the powerful and intense performances of the dancers had infected and caused an itch in the blood to embody the mathematical precision of movement phrases that capture the existential poetics, wry wit and deep humanity of canonical twentieth century author Samuel Beckett. 
 
The dancers of Compagnie Maguy Marin perform with extraordinary focus, clarity and lyricism – in a register of movement that translates Beckett’s surreal, existential and absurdist style in choreographic form. This work conjures up the following images for me;
 
The spectral beauty of spaces between
The desire to say and the impossibility of saying
The mathematics of mis-communication
The precision of pack mentality
Absence of difference yet each so different
The geometry of living
Each time as if new, each time the same
Always death in life and always repetition
 
Always unison, always detail
Military joviality
Precise poetics, minute attention to detail
A sense of post WWII timelessness
The poetry of the ordinary, tragi-comedy
As if his very heart was glowing
Going somewhere but always ending up in the same place
A place of dust and ash
 
This work invites consideration of the nature of homage in creative practice – Marin’s choreography references Beckett in highly literal (specific characters from Beckett’s plays and novellas such as Pozzo and Lucky from Waiting For Godot appear during one section of the work) and more abstract ways, in the carefully sculpted rhythms and the existential sense that imbues the whole of the work. Yet the experience of watching this work is quite different to attending a Beckett play.

In its sheer liveliness, momentum and physicality, May B testifies to the process of translation as one that is hugely inventive, generating new forms of culture in the movement of ideas between the specificity of creative disciplines.            


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