Kunstencentrum Vooruit, Gent, België

An urban purgatory of mismatched souls, a metropolitan circus with a ruthless ring mistress lashing out at the performers with her tongue, a seedy hospital ward for miscellaneous maladies and neurosis – these and other surreal or sombre settings provide the frame for Wim Vandekeybus’s new work Menske.

Snippets glimpsed during a rehearsal promised that the show would possess all the punch and thrust that has, since the early eighties, propelled the Belgian whiz-kid of contemporary dance to the fore. But there’s also an underlying pensiveness, hovering as a more sober sub-text.

In 2006, Spiegel, Vandekeybus’s previous piece, looked back over 20 years of Ultima Vez, revisiting and reviving that now notorious intuitive energy. Today, Vandekeybus has put down the mirror and turned his focus onto his performers. Ten performers make up the cast of Menske (Dutch dialect for ‘little person’). These individuals are the backbone of the piece. Together with Vandekeybus, they have distilled the raw material out of their own personalities. They portray ten distinct characters who colour the piece in hues that span the garish and brash to the pale and translucent. According to dramaturge Greet Van Poeck this extensive collaboration, with the performers writing all the texts themselves, is a recently renewed departure for the company. Even the music by Belgian alternative rock-pop man Daan was being composed in sync with the rehearsal process.

Dominatrix

Two of the show’s performers, Kylie Walters and Manuel Ronda described their take on the work that is largely of their own making.

Menske is the first Ultima Vez production for Australian born Kylie Walters. She was spotted by Vandekeybus whilst performing with the British based company DV8, directed by fellow Australian Lloyd Newson

“I’d seen some of Wim’s early work when it was very frenetic” she told me. “I was very curious as to why I’d caught Wim’s eye because I couldn’t imagine myself fitting in. After chatting, it became apparent Menske was going to be a little different. In DV8 I was used to talking and generating my own material. What attracted me to Wim was his completely different approach. Lloyd is very cerebral, detailed and controlling. Wim on the other hand is more instinctive, working with different energies, just seeing how they confront each other. With Wim, the general flavour of what you do is set, but within that you have a lot of freedom.”

The starting point for Menske was a series of questions probing people’s reaction to change and their capacity to adapt when their convictions fall apart.
Walters revealed something of how the company turned intellectual conundrums into vivid, live performance. “Some of us read a lot, then everyone proposed different improvisations. We built up some base material for the characters and then pushed them in certain directions. The core of the characters really came from us. Wim tweaked them along the way, giving some identities more definition ”.

Walters, in life calm, clear and softly spoken, plays a personage that switches from a masked dominatrix, to the cruel ring mistress, to a fervent, power hungry property developer. She plays all with equal aplomb.

“When you propose an improvisation,” she reflects, “although it comes from you it’s often pure fantasy. You do however have to have an affinity with the character you’re playing. You have to somehow be able to say: ‘If I really stretch my imagination to the extreme, I could go there.’ To get the best out of yourself you have to be able, even in some subtle way, to identify with who you’re playing on stage’. It may be just a way of moving or a certain physical quality.”

Theatrical therapy

Ronda has been with the company longer than Walters and admits: “After Spiegel, it was nice to have a much calmer piece for the body. Spiegel was 120 minutes of pure movement, whereas Menske is much more of an internal trip. But there lies the piece’s challenge. We are ten different people and each of us went through a very personal process, a sort of theatrical therapy if you like. We didn’t need to use big or heavy themes because with a group of that size, interesting, important things crop up automatically, simply because we are people. We move, we say things, we react. That’s the essence of the piece”.

Ronda confesses to have had no formal acting training, nor to have ever attended a technical dance school. “Wim looks for energy more than technique, he continues, I apply the same energy whether I’m approaching movement or a text. It’s not about technique, it’s about creating a dynamic. As a dancer it’s very much what attracts me to Ultima Vez. Wim’s work really matches what I believe communicates on stage. Having had quite a lot of experience in other companies, I realize that if you want to make a living as a dancer you have to grasp what you can. You are very lucky if you end up in a company you really like, as is the case for me now.”

In a puff of smoke

As an Italian, Ronda, a natural bonviveur, claims to have renounced his country of origin with its wonderful food and weather for the less worldly sustenance of art, dance and theatre, albeit in Belgium’s dismal climate. Nevertheless he insists that: “dance is about life – so as a dancer, even though we work so hard and live on a sort of island we also have to live life fully in order to be able to speak about it on stage”.

In Menske, Ronda’s plays an enigmatic character who sometimes disappears, quite literally, in a puff of smoke! “Maybe, Ronda concludes, Menske is about this: at one point we realize how very lonely we are and how we’ve constructed things around us to hold on to and to fill the empty spaces — and then how we build walls to protect ourselves from that fact.”

Although Menske has layers that seem to be dark investigations of the psyche, it has others that suddenly dazzle and amaze. – and there are some pretty good jokes too! Surely as multifaceted as the people that made it.

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