Skid & SAABA

Dancers have flocked to Sweden from more than 20 countries to work with its contemporary dance company in Gothenburg. For the Sydney Festival they’re bringing two super-stylish, hypnotic and slightly chilling works, which are now signatures for Goteborgsoperans.

The first showpiece, Skid, from French Belgian choreographer Damien Julet, is on a massive, blinding white platform, so sharply inclined at 34 degrees that dancers, who keep appearing from the top, inevitably if artfully slide to the bottom out of sight.  Gliding like star fish or dropping down like amoebas, they also work together struggling to stand before slipping down, often dragging partners with them. 

Dressed protectively like sensible Scandinavians for the snowfields, Skid is both repetitive dream and nightmare as dancers battle – and play – with gravity to the squeak of their rubber shoes and low booming electronics from Christian Fennesz and composer Marihiko Hara.  

Later anxieties lessen, the music turns loud and rhythmic, as the full lot of 17 dancers work in full lines to mount the heights; Joakim Brink’s stark downward lighting becomes more colourful, creating a beautiful fabric of shadows behind the figures. 

Skid climbs to a slow finish with a tall naked man crawling from a suspended cocoon and then marching upwards. Will he defy gravity? Skid is an outstanding and compelling work although some more emotional interaction between dancers would warm up its chill.

In Sharon Eyal’s Saaba the dancers have become like drugged aliens, dressed as though naked in body-coloured unitards, first shaped tight as exclamation marks, making small leaps on demi-pointe and repeating small, exquisite movements. Dior’s creative director Maria Grazia did the costumes but it wasn’t a big job.

To Ori Lichtik’s dark pounding club music, dancers emerge in small groups into the light, like slow dodgem cars, following and echoing each other with impressive clockwork synchronisation.  Movements shift, arms outstretched, bodies arching, and always an individual dancing along beside to their own tune, but hardly in abandonment.  The repetition, as pointless as repetition is,  continues till the end, but both these works are significant Festival events and a must for dance fans.

Martin Portus

Photograher: Victor Frankowski