Choreographer Ea Sola, who is both French and Vietnamese, "crossed Confucian countries converted to the global economy and thought of La Boetie."

Etienne de la Boetie was born in France in 1530 and wrote his treatise of the politics of obedience sometime in 1550, when still a law student, dying at the age of 33 in 1563. Like Ea Sola he puzzled "how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him."

His is a theory of non-violence, of civil disobedience and some say, a promotion of anarchy. In her response in The White Body, Ea Sola places … [More]

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In The White Body Vietnamese/French choreographer Ea Sola explores the nature of tyranny and subjection. The burning question smouldering throughout this work is: How can massive populations of human beings allow tyrants to have such gruesome power over them?

The White Body in question might be the character of Etienne de La Boetie, who Sola describes in the programme as "this White Body/ who invented non violence/ who said that we must give consideration to the freedom that is within each one of us", or the White Body might be you or I, who today is dominated by a global body, "exhausted the whole year, unprotected, working non stop. This body of work, that nevertheless seems happy while walking through their brightly-lit city."

Sola’s performance vocabulary is European and post modern. Onstage, a performance space is mapped out with a plastic curtain separating three dancers from three figures seated behind laptops on desks. With the dancers obscured, the audience experiences dancers in partial presence and partial absence, simultaneously frustrating and alluring in their abstraction.

Layered with the movement is La Boetie’s Discourse of Voluntary Servitude – from 1548 –  whispered in French by two of the seated figures; a text chillingly prescient for the politics of today, especially when we consider the tyrannical effects of capitalism.

Perhaps predictably, the work grows in intensity, volume and pace towards a frenzied grapple with the confines of the material structure of the wall. Precise and sophisticated lighting emphasises and morphs the image of pressed skin against the barrier.

In its marketing the Auckland Festival is inviting audiences into the unknown. With The White Body Ea Sola has created a strange and challenging work which indeed asks its audience to follow into unfamiliar terrain, brought powerfully to life by dancers Luong Xuan Thanh, Ngo Tanh Phuong and Pham Chi Cuong. Nguyen Xuan Son’s music, (Son being the third of the figures sitting benignly behind lap tops before the boundary sheet) played live onstage, created an intense soundscape evoking the insidious rhythms and sudden violence of tyranny.

Watching this alongside Mau Dance Company’s Tempest the evening before has made a profound impact on my week. Both works evoke political activism via intense and stunningly designed stage imagery to open up a space for audiences to consider historical ethical questions in the here and now.
   

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