Sudden Showers of Silence

How to read the book of the body offered by Slovak Jozef Fruček and Greek Linda Kapetanea? Even the name of their dance group suggests it. It has to be read with the view pointed at the roots. The dancers, though, have their roots airy, this is why the view of the audience must not be stiff but jumping and levitating. The title of their production can also tell us a lot. There are same repeated speech sounds emphasized here, sound flesh, physical tissue into which we wrap our human notions and perceptions. Bare speech sounds are the roots of the ideas which later develop from them, and their fragile, sensitive differences.

Jozef and Linda come down to the roots also by the original story. In it they name themselves Hector and Andromache, but in their loneliness on the stage they could easily be Deucalion and Pyrrha after the catastrophe in which humankind died, and speak like Ovid in Metamorphosis: “The sister and wife, the only woman who survived the destruction, on the whole earth only the two of us are humankind.”  Jozef and Linda descend to our common European archetypes, to ancient myths. If the dance, as an artistic genre in general, is an archaeology of the body, then in this production it is absolute truth. They descend to the depths of their modern bodies, cultivated by contemporary dance techniques and current practice of martial arts, to verify what stayed left from the archaic archetypes of a man and a woman – the warrior and a potential dead hero and the woman/ mother and a potential widow and slave.

In the modern bodies there is a lot of the archaic which has been left. In the woman who follows the steps of her man; on the floor both dancers leave the steps of their coloured bodies, their physical airy roots. Nevertheless, behind this everlasting stability of roles there is a merciless fight raging by which the Man and the Woman, the Hero and the Widow, struggle towards themselves as well as from themselves. Their sticks hit against each other hardly like irreversible arguments, they have strong ankles of mountain nations. They struggle themselves towards the new interpretation of ancient times, very material and cruel one, or they clench their sticks or they look for other ways of how to touch each other, whether it is when Andromache kneads the dough or hangs in a levitating dance of death from Hector´s body. And with them, martial percussions push forward in the original composition by Greek composer Dimitris Dessilas. Similarly like in modern literature, the choreographers leave not only the necessary tragic feeling of life behind the decaying destiny of Andromache but also the feeling of existential emptiness behind the heroism of Hector.

Therefore, read this text of dance, dear attentive readers, the same way you read James Joyce´s Ulysses. You have never had the patience to read it to the end? It is your problem, is it not?
Nina Vangeli