Aiming for an unconventional piece of dance theater.

Byline: Matthew Mosley

Summary: "If you have forgotten to switch off your mobile phone, please don't bother to do so. If you have a camera, please use the flash - it's good for our egos. We would be flattered if you bootlegged this performance and put it on YouTube ..." Not the conventional opening for a show, but "Extended Teenage Era" strives to be an unconventional piece of dance-theater.

Review

BEIRUT: "If you have forgotten to switch off your mobile phone, please don't bother to do so. If you have a camera, please use the flash - it's good for our egos. We would be flattered if you bootlegged this performance and put it on YouTube ..." Not the conventional opening for a show, but "Extended Teenage Era" strives to be an unconventional piece of dance-theater. For a start, one of the performers is a 5-year-old toddler who wanders around the stage unhindered. The soundtrack is a schizophrenic mix of Schubert, Bob Marley, Justin Timberlake and excerpts from the movie "Donnie Darko." The set is constructed live by the performers from an assortment of plastic tubes, cardboard boxes and reams of cellotape.

Showing at Masrah al-Madina on Tuesday as part of the BIPOD festival, "Extended Teenage Era" is the work of 42-year-old choreographer Samir Akika. Born in Algiers, Akika grew up in Paris, studied in the US and settled in Dusseldorf. His globe-trotting is reflected in the polyglot nature of the performers, a blend of Germans, Canadians and Spaniards.

Together they explore the tribulations of passing into adulthood. The tricky business of navigating social groups and societal pressures is expressed via a mix of break-dance, monologues and the occasional homegrown stunt.

Dressed in bright, primary colored T-shirts and khaki sweatpants, the eight performers are so clean-cut they could have stepped straight from an ad for hair-gel, or a youthful clothing line.

"Extended Teenage Era" intersperses high-octane dance numbers with moments in which performers share their memories and anecdotes. As with many modern dance pieces, the spoken-work interludes were often rather dull.

The performers reveled in the goofiness of their stories. Canadian Dawna Dryhoub talked about her cat with which she plays hide and seek. Lotte Rudhart spoke in a not particularly interesting way about learning the piano as a young girl.

When they got round to dancing, the performers were thrilling. Much of the footwork was based on modern urban styles such as hip-hop and break dance. The dancers bounced around in what appeared to be semi-improvised dance-offs, before freezing, balanced on their hands with legs entwined around one another, parallel to the floor.

Trained in a number of different styles, the dancers were allowed a high degree of individuality in their solos.

The cast boasted a mime artist, who jerked and slithered like an android battling through treacle, and an acrobat who leapt and twirled though the air before landing catlike, ready for the next move.

The performers were winsome in their constant efforts to keep the audience entertained. Various surreal moments kept the audience chuckling. Performers constructed a pyramid of plastic buckets while taking part in a high-energy, Fame-style dance routine. One of the dancers donned a motorbike helmet and lay stomach-down, stretched out straight as an arrow, on a backless office chair. Her colleagues then launched her headfirst at the pile of buckets, which she duly toppled.

The piece finished with the construction of an incredible, Heath Robinson-style contraption that filled the entire stage. A balloon popped, a wad of string unraveled, a plank fell over, a ball fell down a gutter and so forth until a stick nudged a TV switch off. The stunt didn't quite work Tuesday evening, but entertained nonetheless.

Sometimes the cast's incessant efforts to maintain a light tone became a little trying. A violent, passionate, immensely powerful duet exploring roles of power and vulnerability between men and women was constantly interrupted by a shirt-less pair who enacted a campy circus routine in the background.

Following pantomime tradition, a number of local references were made.

In one ice-breaking game, a celebrity name was stuck to the forehead of each performer, who then asked questions of each other and the audience to find their identity. One of these names was Diana Haddad. Later in the show, a bottle of 961 beer was produced and drunk in one gulp by a dancer who had just performed a surprisingly successful stand-up comedy routine, riffing on the theme of the breakfasting habits of the Germans.

None of these postmodern highjinks were evident in the work of the Choi Kyung Shil dance company, who took to the BIPOD stage Saturday.

Named "Arirang Arario" after a famous Korean folk song, the title roughly translates as "Lovesickness." In its program, the company explains that such lovesickness can apply to a yearning for "nature among the modern civilizations" or a longing for "freedom from intimidation and humiliation." Their ambition: "A lovesickness festival will be held."

This lovesickness festival was an absolute delight. Classical technique was combined with an earthy, feral aesthetic. One minute, dancers appeared to be as wobbly-legged as a foal, the next they leapt and bound with a vigor that would shame a baboon.

Most pieces were performed by a quartet of dancers, two men and two women.

Wearing tail-coats with T-shirts and baggy trousers, the only props were four battered kettles that were used variously as musical instruments, stools and spinning tops.

Displaying the resilience of marionettes, individual dancers crashed to the floor only to leap up again, light as a feather.

These puppet-like characteristics were augmented by a lolling heads, stiff pirouettes and a seemingly out-of-control stumbling across the floor. At one moment, the arms of one dancer came out from behind the body of another, caressing her face and beating her breast. The effect was comical and unsettling, like a magically animated doll.

There were a number of charming love duets. The dancers capered through courtly routines to a baroque soundtrack, the formality interrupted by manic sessions of footsy or swift, ungainly groping, expressive of simmering passion masked by a bashful exterior.

There was the odd longeur: Kyung Shil is not afraid to make her audience wait as her dancers exit the stage in a stubbornly unorthodox manner: Sliding and pushing, hermit crab-like, or writhing and shaking like an electrified snake.

For the final, titular, routine, Kyung Shil herself emerged. A tall, striking woman, she stumbled past a pile of dry leaves that had been swept onto the stage. A long, floppy sleeve, completely covering her hand, was caressed and manipulated as if it had a life of its own. After some hesitation, she flung herself into the pile and buried her head in the vegetation.

On her exit, the four dancers re-emerged, also with one oversized sleeve. This alternately became a blindfold, a comfort-blanket or an elongated limb as the dancers stomped among the scattered leaves.

The soaring, romantic melody of the folk song was eventually drowned out by blasts of interference, as the dancers writhed and squirmed in exquisite expression of lovesickness.

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