In 2011 I was dramaturg to Lisi Estaras on her short research project 'Soup', for les ballets c de la b.

 

I was also commissioned by les ballets to write a piece about this project for the website. Se below.

 

And for more info see www.lesballetscdela.be

 



Seasoning the Soup

By

Lou Cope

 

 

Just before Christmas 2010 Lisi Estaras presented ‘Soup’ at the les ballets C de la B studios in Ghent, Belgium.

 

The set up is simple enough. A horseshoe of tables with chairs for 60 people (laid as in a restaurant with menus, cutlery, glasses for wine and water, serviettes and bread) surrounds the performance space. At the back there is another table and 9 expectant performers sit at it, warm up, chat or greet friends. They watch us and we watch them. There are two microphones standing around and behind the performers is a huge wall with live footage of what is happening being projected onto it. To the side of them Isnelle Da Silveira works away to cook the soup that we can smell and that we are about to eat. Lighting is cosy, with small lamps on each table to add to the ambiance, and a variety of inviting music is played as we all hungrily await … something.

 

Then Geert Belpaeme stands from amongst the performers to welcome us, and he explains the idea of the evening. The year is coming to an end, it is the season of goodwill, so we will join together, eat some soup and have some fun. The performers will do their best to entertain us, but in the spirit of the season, we will all be invited to contribute to the occasion.

 

There are some rules:

·      In front of us we see a buzzer and if we press the button something will happen. (Elusively he leaves it at that.)

·      If you raise your right arm it means you have something you want to say.

·      If you raise your left arm it means you want more soup.

·      Everybody has a menu on the table in front of them. On the menu there is a choice of small performative moments that are available to be seen – moments from past shows or simply things the performers fancy trying.  (For example: ‘A solo by Nico from Foi’[1]; ‘Meytal [2] talks about her mother’; ‘Sam [3] is pregnant’; ‘Miriam [4] does some beatboxing’…) If we want to see any of these moments, or indeed if there is anything at all we would like them to do, we can write it down on the attached card which will be collected during the show.

·      We, the audience, are welcome to crawl under the tables to enter the performance at any point we wish.

 

It becomes clear that some soup is being made, but that we are expected to season it to our own taste.

 

Lisi explains: ‘I wanted to challenge myself using improvisation and specific rules to build up a show for an event, using the les ballets studio (S3) as a theatre but with a totally different set up that would transform the building. I wanted an event where people came together to share and to eat at a very specific moment of the year: Christmas. I wanted something informal that the audience could direct with decisions about what they want to see and for how long.’

 

And so the evening begins. What follows is a mix of prepared, improvised and semi-improvised dance theatre. There is a liveness, a sense of chaos, and an interaction with each other and with now, that makes each ‘performance’ a truly unique occasion.

 

Shownotes:

Janet Novas cries gently into the camera – her face projected enormously onto the wall. The other performers gaze at her projected image, not her, and dance a response to it.

 

There is live writing, live resolutions (‘I’m going to get 300 friends on Facebook’, ‘I’m going to be a better person’, ‘I’m going to smoke more’.) and live apologies. All ‘real’ or ‘real-esque’ we assume.

 

Samuel Lefevre shares a semi-prepared sequence they call ‘Not knowing’  (which in rehearsal I learned was) inspired by a short film Sam has seen about an American woman who has a neurological condition called Agnosia. She cannot recognise objects, nor does she have a 3-dimensional understanding of space. She tries to reach for an object but her hand just moves through empty space, missing it completely. Sam’s work is immediately beautiful, and for me, strikes a strong metaphor for attainment, and sweet personal endeavour. There is a loneliness to it. It’s about the space around the thing, not the thing itself. Not-touching, not touching. Missed opportunities, mis-calculations, mistakes.

 

 

The performances are driven in four ways:

·      Firstly by the audience – we press a buzzer and the performers have to stop whatever it is they are doing and move on to the next idea. At times this is greeted with dismay from both performers and audience, as one person culls what is another person’s pleasure.

·      Secondly, by the preparation and serving of soup.

·      Thirdly, by the performers who have the right to intervene in what is happening: they can say Copy, Replace or Repeat as and when they wish.

·      And finally, by director Lisi Estaras – who joins in the improvisation as a kind of DJ. She responds to the requests, surprises and requirements of the event by changing the music. Sometimes the performers know what a certain piece of music requires – for example Pergolesi’s ‘Stabat mater dolorosa’ means ‘Do the disco bit’; and at other times Lisi too responds to the moment and surprises everyone, including herself, by selecting music that she thinks will support or enhance what is happening. After the event Lisi commented: ‘My role as a DJ was a very stressful task but looking back I really enjoyed it because I could push the timing of things and direct the piece giving it tempo. I have the tendency to rush and speed up, so in this way sometimes I think it was annoying for the performers that it was me doing it. And of course, interestingly, the length of things can determine content as well.’

 

Add to all this the fact that performer Sanne Haenen has a Christmas hat from which she occasionally pulls one or two names of performers, and thus instructs them to randomly jam together, and you truly have a list of ingredients rich enough to create the most intense melange.

 

And in keeping with the season of goodwill, Lisi was keen to set up very direct relationships between the audience and the performers, with generosity and exchange at the heart of it all.

 

                       

Shownotes:

Performer Arend Pinoy introduces us all to a member of the audience: ‘I saw Naomi at the beginning of the piece, well it’s not really a piece, but I saw her and she caught my eye immediately. She’s beautiful.’ He has written her a poem during the show. Eventually this flirtatious interaction leads to every member of the cast kissing the poor unsuspecting Naomi.

 

A request from the audience reads ‘I want Sanne to sing, Arend to cry and I want Miriam to tell my boyfriend who is sitting next to me how beautiful his hair is.’ They, of course, oblige.

 

Another request is: ‘Make a human pyramid while Isnelle sings.’ They do.

 

We see soup quietly made and then served. The smell beguiles us, and Isnelle de Silveira dissects the space with majesty, glee and candour as she delivers warmth and energy to us all. Some hungry audience members raise their hand four times for more!

 

 

It was absolutely fascinating to see this multi-directional improvised communication taking place. Not always comfortable, and indeed not always successful, but basking in the skill and, unusually, ‘live honesty’ of such talented and seasoned performers was quite an experience. The performance lay at an intersection between the wishes, tastes, knowledges and skills of every single person in the room, and we all had a joint (if unequal) responsibility to be brave, explore and enjoy. On many occasions I found myself bowing to the incredible lack of shyness of audience members - people were really keen to play. And when things didn’t work out, well there was always a buzzer to bring a startlingly abrupt change.

 

Shownotes:

Lisi plants an intervention in the audience. Keen to see how the performers respond, she asks a friend to enter the space and do a flamenco dance. While not the most successful moment of the evening – the look of restrained bewilderment on the faces of performers and audiences alike is an absolute treat.

 

Meytal Blanaru, Israeli dancer and choreographer based in Brussels, says of the ‘Soup’ experience:

 

“I felt I got a chance to give very personal, intimate sides of me as a performer. Some moments worked more than others, and sometimes the audience chose to ‘beep me’, which was also a big confrontation for me. Since I am quite hard on myself, my ‘failures’ made me feel frustrated... but it was a special project for me. You lost some of the safety net but I was really happy to be involved in a performance that allows a closer, more simple and communicative interaction with the audience.”

 

And there was indeed an increased sense of intimacy. Present in the way the performers spoke to us, individually, directly and quietly; in the way the soup was carefully made for, and warmly served to, us; in the way the performers took risks, discovered pleasures, lost and found their way; and in the way we the audience invested, played fair, took our own risks and made our own mistakes.

 

Shownotes:

Film maker and dancer Lazara Rosell Albear moves silently around the space, recording both the performance and the audience, projecting it live onto the wall at the back of the space. As well as presenting the live dance as film which, of course, has its own effect on the nature, texture and quality of the work, this also has a strangely distancing effect. By increasing our consciousness of the ‘now’ and our role in it, it also seems to increase our awareness of the rules and dynamics at play here. It is all a game, and part of the game is watching how the game works and what role we play in it.

 

Something else interesting that arose was the different modes of performance: improvised and rehearsed. These are skilled performers – many at the top of their game, and it was great to watch them morph between modes. At one moment improvising ‘in the zone’ – really communicating with each other, the music, the context, the now; then bringing out old material that profoundly fits on and belongs to both their souls and bodies; and then, just occasionally, in moments where nothing much is happening and no sparks are flying, they fall back on default modes of movement, signature styles unenhanced by external contributions with regard to content, context or form.

 

The sense of safety, trust and even gratitude one feels when watching someone skilled perform known material is part of why we like to see performance. Relax and enjoy. But in a show like this, when no-one really knows what will, or even can, happen next – it’s different. At times there is real uneasiness that no-one knows what is going on, real fear that the performer may not make it from now till then with grace. There is fear that the gag won’t work, the intervention won’t enhance, that the show will turn itself inside out to reveal a disturbing emptiness.

 

But of course this is exactly the point. These are the risks we are savouring. And because we are all here working together, because there is no layer of narrative, character or even theme to make demands on us, when frailty creeps in we can all acknowledge it, pat it on the back, and begin again with something new. When a dancer doesn’t know what to do he’ll tell us – ‘I don’t know what to do’, or he’ll launch with a tired sigh and a knowing smile into some floor work, and wait for someone to bail him out….

 

And along with these flirtations with failure, we also get the opportunity to embrace real, spontaneous magic. The type of ‘live beauty’ that audiences never normally get to see – because of course most everything we see on stage (that has been devised and improvised) is a distilled, edited, practiced and dulled version of a beautiful spontaneous moment that took place in rehearsal. In ‘Soup’ they are actually sharing some of the real magic.

 

It’s unusual for the performers too. Lisi has created a structure that goes from loosely set material (for example, they take it in turns to follow ‘a leader’ as they trace the line of the audience’s tables around the space) to ‘this is the bit where your names are pulled from a hat and you do something’. Terrifying freedom and opportunity.

 

Lisi comments: ‘In general the performers loved the opportunity of being allowed to not know and make mistakes. Sometimes they felt bad about their decisions or their colleagues’ decisions, but their feedback was very encouraging and I’d very much like to repeat this kind of experience.’

 

In fact the bravery of what happens here lies in Lisi’s restraint. She has assembled the ingredients of something rather exciting, but has left it to fate, chance, the audience and the performers to bind it together; to make the stock as it were. I watched her watch the show with delight, amusement, fear and horror. But she had meant it when she said that she wanted to see what would happen when the audience got to make decisions about the rhythm, direction and even content of the piece. And she had wanted to give everyone a Christmas treat – which is exactly what she did.

 

 

Shownotes:

Towards the end we see a semi-prepared sequence that involves the performers inviting members of the audience to crawl under their table and join them in a waltz. It’s a joyous celebratory moment, where ‘safety in numbers’ allows the audience participants to relax and (seemingly) genuinely enjoy it. Those that don’t join in also relax and chat to each other as they finish their soup. Some performer-audience duos get really into it and improvise wildly, but most simply waltz and smile sweetly. It ends suddenly when all the dancers collapse, leaving their guests looking bizarrely tall and lonely, but it is done with kindness and the audience quickly understand that the party is over and their time is up. They crawl back to safety, soup, and satisfaction – knowing that they too contributed to the live creative exchange that was ‘Soup’.

 

 

Lisi Estaras hopes to revisit some of the ideas explored in ‘Soup’ as part of a longer project in the future. In the meantime ‘Primero’ continues its international tour, and Lisi is working on projects with both Ceremonia and NTGent.