DANCE

Zero Degrees for Collaboration

Sarah Frater

COLLABORATIONis the most overused word in the theatre, and the most misused. It implies a meetings of artistic minds, a true synergy of choreographer and artist, who together create something greater than the sum of their parts. In truth, real collaboration is a rare breed. More likely is the classy commission, where a savvy choreographer hires a trendy artist, and there’s a feel-good buzz for all concerned – theatregoers are only too pleased to clock the name, artists enjoy the kudos of the stage, and the choreographer snags the sort of publicity she or he would otherwise struggle to gain alone. Was it like this when Akram Khan, the British-Bangladeshi dancer and choreographer, asked Antony Gormley to design his project with fellow dancerchoreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui? If the project started out that way, by the time it reached the stage this new piece had become one of the few true collaborations in years. Zero Degrees is a 75 minute duet, or more correctly a quartet, for Khan, Cherkaoui and Gormley’s casts of the two. On stage, the dummy doubles are manhandled around, two inert, silent forms controlled by two living, speaking bodies. The contrast is immense, and only as the piece progresses do the four figures fuzz and merge in a subtle process of transference and dependency. The dummies start as dummies, then morph into sentinels, surrogates, and self-portraits. They are graveyard statuary, then something like those sinister mannequins that dominate the ventriloquist; they represent projections of our longings, and a reflection of them back. The work was inspired by Khan seeing an old man die on a train in India. “The starting point is the notion that you can never really achieve still

ness”, Khan said at the time. “In life you are breathing, in death your body decomposes. When do you die? This is the transitional point, the point I call zero degrees”. Gormley was an ideal collaborator, not because of his sculptor’s aesthetic, or for his focus on the human body, or the obvious similarities between dance and sculpture, such as its silence and threedimensionality. The deeper resonance lies in the way dance and sculpture use the body as both subject and material, the place of memory and transformation, as well as the means of registering emotions without the mediation of words, paint or celluloid.

“I’m not a set-dresser”, Gormley tells me. “I don’t do off-the-peg designs. I’m interested to work directly on life itself, to make the unmediated imaginative. [To] metaphorically reach out a hand and say ‘be with me a while and live more intensely’”. Of course, as well as the similarities between dance and sculpture, there are also huge differences. Sculpture is not only still while choreography is dynamic, but sculpture is permanent when dance is ephemeral. For many, that makes it more potent. “Dance is its own instrument”, says Gormley. “And I find that thrilling. It only exists at the moment of performance. You are there at the point of

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creation with the dancers. And the stiffness of the mannequins [in Zero Degrees] only accentuates our mobility”. Contemporary art has long influenced stage design, and artists have always worked in the theatre as well as the studio. Even Leonardo designed sets and costumes, including Il Paradiso, a masque or operetta to celebrate the wedding of Duke Gian Galeazzo to Isabella of Aragon in 1490. In modern times, art-dance linkups flourished with Sergei Diaghilev, and more recently the American choreographer Merce Cunningham has worked with Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Richard Hamilton, while in London Sarah Lucas has created designs for Michael Clark, as has Anish Kapoor for Akram Khan. Some of these were true collaborations, others look more like mood makers, albeit visually clever ones. Few in recent times have matched Zero Degrees. The piece begins with Khan and Cherkaoui simultaneously describing a brush with Indian immigration bureaucracy, and ends with their witnessing the death of the old man. In between it becomes a story of the quick and the dead. Khan and Cherkaoui honour their own movement styles – Khan’s robust and luxuriant Kathak, while the frail-looking Cherkaoui almost dissolves his own form. From the sum of these parts, Khan and Cherkaoui convey our heartbreaking helplessness when someone passes from this life to the next. Gormley’s casts ratchet the effect, and complete the artistic transference from stage to auditorium. “The story [of the old man dying] is everybody’s”, he says.

Zero Degrees returns to the Sadler’s Wells Theatre from 16-20th October 2007. See www.akramkhancompany.net for more.

58 | The Liberal | Autumn 2007