Members of Ultima Vez perform a scene from "Spiegel"
Dance troupe explores body's reaction to freedom
Belgian choreographer Wim Vandekeybus’ international company Ultima Vez presents the movement and energy of freedom in the new performance piece "Spiegel."
by Mark Kanny
When Belgian choreographer Wim Vandekeybus formed his own company 22 years ago, he took his dancers to Spain to explore his ideas and the aspects of movement that interest him most.
In Spain, Vandekeybus decided to call his troupe Ultima Vez, Spanish for Last Time, because "everything is unique. There is no first or last. Everything is ultima vez."
Ultima Vez is an international company, with eight of its nine or 10 dancers from different countries. It is based in Brussels, Belgium.
Photography and film were the first artistic media for Vandekeybus, who did not have a dance education. He says he became interested in dance to "show the power of theatrical madness."
"Spiegel" is the choreographer's look, refracted over time, at his own creations. It includes elements of "What the Body Does Remember," "Bereft of a Blissful Union," "In Spite of Wishing and Wanting" and "Inasmuch as Life Is Borrowed."
"When you see 'Spiegel,' you feel different forms," he says. "In the beginning, it is very animalistic. ... That becomes very tight in the middle and gets organic. Our movements are very clear. The last scene is a scene of the blood on the heart driven to the extremes of the limbs and sucked back. It's kind of a heartbeat."
Vandekeybus is fascinated by "the necessity of movement when the body does not remember. Not out of aesthetic beauty but animal instinct, survival instinct. The language is the inner state, the organic animality rather than technical skill. Energy is very important.
"What I was interested in, almost from the beginning, was freedom without thinking. How can it be that, when I fall, my arms go out to protect me? The beauty of this accident can suddenly get dramatic beauty. Repeating this trust, this intuition -- that is what the body does not remember," he says.
Vandekeybus is interested in the absence of freedom, too, and says many dancers are so controlled that, when they are free, they get in a panic.
He says creating "Spiegel" felt "like traveling across the desert. You can't go back, because, if you're half way, it's as far to go back as forward. We took a little bit of the best of many scenes. Some things are identical, such as a bricks scene. It's mainly based on walking and throwing bricks, and that can't be different" when reworked into a new show.
Yet, he says, "We had to make a new piece, not just a collage. I wanted it to have the flow and body of a whole new piece." The adjustments he made are both small and wide-ranging but, in general, create more compact forms. Where one scene might have required 16 people performing for 22 minutes, the version in "Spiegel" uses nine or 10 people for 15 minutes.
