Brace Yourself for ‘Evening Prayer’
By Seo Dong-shin
Staff Reporter
Contemporary dance is a genre that is hardly very kind or particularly interesting to the audience-at-large, in its drive to be experimental and artistic. What if a contemporary dance piece drives such characteristics to the extreme, while drawing inspirations from classical music and psychiatric patients at the same time?
``VSPRS'' would fall into that category. The vowel-less, puzzling-to-pronounce title comes from ``Vespro della Beata Vergine'' or ``Vespers for the Blessed Virgin,'' a musical work by Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643). Titled ``Evening Prayer'' in Korean, the meaning of Vespers, the piece will be on stage at LG Arts Center in southern Seoul from May 25-27.
``VSPRS'' is the creation of Alain Platel, who founded and leads the Les Ballets C. de la B. in Belgium, a contemporary dance mecca, under the motto ``Everyone can do everything.''
The choreographer reportedly combined two seemingly contrasting influences _ 17th century religious music and film recording the movements of the mentally ill, made by Belgian anatomist Arthur van Gehuchten in the early 20th century.
The resulting piece has 10 dancers _ a multi-national lot hailing from France, Belgium, Vietnam, Spain, New Zealand, the United States, the Netherland, and South Korea _ on stage. The dancers enact the hysterical movements of psychiatric patients having a fit, against a background of a white mountain of underwear. A 10-man ensemble consisting of jazz, gypsy, and Baroque musicians, and a singer will perform re-worked Monteverdi's music live.
The 95-minute piece has received mixed reviews around Europe since its premier in Paris last year. While critics praised its clever reference to alienated individuals in contemporary society, and its intensity, a few audience members have reportedly responded by walking out.
In one climactic moment when the dancers who are engaged in repetitive movement that resembles masturbation come to a sudden stop, Ye Hyo-seung, the 33-year-old South Korean dancer who performs in Platel's piece, said in an interview: ``When a British journalist asked each of us dancers about how it feels at this moment, the answers, given individually, were surprisingly all same. It was that when we stopped on the climax, the image that came across our mind was `mother.' We experienced the moment of finding something that will redeem us.''
Tickets cost from 30,000 won to 70,000 won. For more information, visit www.lgart.com.