Dissonant, almost screeching sounds (composition: Mackenzy Bergile) stream from the speakers when the curtain opens. A group of 20 dancers stands or sits in street clothes (costumes: Lydie Tarragon) on the dimly lit, fog-shrouded stage (lighting design: Tom Visser), looking to the right. One of them breaks away and begins to move – with snake-like arms and soft, yielding legs he circles around the group, which largely ignores him. Only slowly do a few move forward, rise from the ground and also begin to join in with their own moves. Hardly anyone is in contact with the others; most act independently of one another, each for themselves.
And so it goes on for a good 70 minutes. Every now and then there are short dance dialogues, someone breaks away from the group and tries to encourage someone else to dance, sometimes it succeeds, sometimes it fails. Individuals chase after others without really reaching them. In between, the group disappears into the darkness of the background, the mass disappears while individuals demonstrate their virtuosity in breaking or hip hop and other street dance styles. And yet everyone remains trapped in their loneliness, enveloped in the fog and darkness of the stage.
Dancers underchallenged
These few solos are the real highlights of the evening. However, due to the shortness of their performances, they remain only spotlights; the artists cannot really show what they are capable of. At the end, they withdraw one after the other from the stage, where a man is still making circular movements. They slowly walk up the grandstand aisles on the K6 and stop there and also at the edge of the stage at greater distances to look at the auditorium. “Témoin” = witness, which probably also means this: the witness lies not only with the spectators, but also with the dancers, who become witnesses to the audience.
“I wanted to explore the ways in which communities can be formed within crowds, as urgency or circulation, and how zooming in and out can bring out the personality and individual traits of the dancers,” says Saïdo Lehlouh in an interview conducted in September 2022 and printed in the program. It would have been interesting to know whether this description has changed over the course of the following two years.
The shortcoming of this new creation by Lehlouh is that “the personalities and individual characteristics” are neglected. These 20 dancers can do so much more than you get to see. One can only imagine what could have been unleashed on stage with these true masters of their craft. As it is, however, it remains tiringly redundant in its leaden monotony and, in combination with the leaden darkness of the stage, broken only by a few individual spotlights, leaves a paralyzing feeling of loneliness. What a pity.
Note from the editors: The press photos used here are not from the Kampnagel performance, but are rehearsal photos from January 31, 2024 (1-3) and April 2023.
