- Photo: Manuel Vason
Early this week I bought a collection of weathered garden gnomes at an outdoor auction in Norfolk (don’t ask!). They have been sitting in the car all week leading rise to speculation as to what they get up to while the car is parked up – and a suggestion that they may well have assumed that Nick White could be Snow’s Prince who having rescued them from an auction has now left them to rot in a glass coffin – how ironic.
The first act of the enigmatic Anatomie had me believing that the gnomes had escaped and were performing their crazy antics on the stage of Sadlers Wells – a feeling further reinforced by a soundtrack/score featuring a fast-talking auctioneer. For this first act the audience, limited to two hundred souls, were placed in the second circle and, as the lights went down, we overheard the (one-sided) conversation of two apparent latecomers then a female dancer in black appeared on the stage folding and unfolding herself in a manic dance to the sound of Bulgarian bagpipes. She was soon joined by a host of other dancers each engaged in their own frenzied activity. If you can picture an animated version of a painting by Pieter Breugel the Elder or, more grotesquely, by Hieronymus Bosch, you will get the general impression. As I usually like to sit as close to the stage as possible being confined to the second circle was an educational experience – virtuosity, though apparent, plays second fiddle to choreography at this distance: a sense that was reinforced when the initial dancer suddenly appeared directly in front of us on the balcony – the three-dimensional experience of watching dance as bodies in space – spectators and performers - was made apparent by the stark foregrounding of one figure so close against the remote backdrop of ‘gnomes at play’.
Over the course of the four acts the audience were requested to move from one location to another – from the second circle to the dress circle, followed by the stalls and finally wending our way through the dancers to the back of the stage. Over the course of our descent we witnessed the transformation of the general to the particular – identities and nuances were located.
At each juncture new sensations were thrown at us – a string orchestra was introduced in the second act; our descent to the stalls was accompanied by a beautiful song performed by Nuno Silva prostrated on a wooden platform raised among the seats, reminiscent of the posture assumed by Mel Gibson before the gruesome disembowelment in Braveheart – though here appearing as if it had been directed by Derek Jarman. Heavy bass and drums (rock, not drum’n'bass) were performed live on stage as the dancers went through the moves of the third act – something was disturbing them, drawing them into a group – perhaps the encroaching audience. The same moves were pretty well repeated for the fourth act but this time observed from behind the dancers.
Finally we completely swapped places with the dancers – the transformation was complete – the performers took their first bow facing away from us towards an empty auditorium and, for the sake of propriety, towards us but from the stalls. The curtain came down and the audience were left on the stage until a large stage door was opened and we were ejected into the night on Rosebery Avenue much like the protagonists in Being John Malkovich were tossed onto the New Jersey Turnpike at the end of their dreamlike experiences. We scratch our heads and, more than a little disorientated, make our way back to our lives.
Further events are looming, I recommend everyone to look at http://www.clodensemble.com/ for details
