Shade Théret’s Étoile Allergique revolves around a strange, fraught intimacy. Two dancers inhabit this black-box set like captives. They appear as though trapped there together, perhaps for a long time already, and yet there is no “togetherness”. Even when gestures coincide or collide, when their bodies tangle or scoop into one another, an unbridgeable distance seems to remain between them. There is nothing we could call “acknowledgment”. They do not, or cannot, look into each other’s faces and address each other.
This lack, or refusal, or failure of address is the central tension of the work. Knowing the piece is dedicated to an experience of serious illness, I cast the dancers in a binary metaphor: Théret as “self”, Heyward as this self’s sick body, the duet as their weary cohabitation in which the body has become foreign; inseparable from the self but estranged from it, speaking a language of symptoms one can’t always understand, much less speak back to.
The piece begins with a punishing, bleating sound of voices distorted beyond intelligibility. Théret sits slumped on the floor with her back to the audience while Heyward rollerskates around the perimeter of the space. A little clumsy but persistent, like a fly scuffing at the glass of a closed window. After a few circuits, she crumples into a dark corner and begins to fiddle with a lighter, flicking it on and off under her chin. The harsh noise eventually gives way to sparse, melancholy piano, overlaid with close sounds of breath, and gentle clicks and smacks like someone sucking on a cough-sweet. An oil-yellow spotlight rises, and Shade stands, turns to face us, unfolding and extending her limbs achily before stepping into it. Stiff arms flap up and down at her sides as if to clear this space for herself, but the gesture is more febrile than defiant; her hands whirring fast enough to blur pink at the edges of the spotlight. Soon rejoined by Heyward, her determination fractures and both dancers propel themselves into erratic, aggressive convulsions, echoing each other through a sequence of close yet never quite synchronous motions.
As the duet moves in and out of these moments of almost-unison, a difference in the dancers’ facial expressions amplifies the alienation between them. Heyward’s expression has a kind of dogged innocence throughout, unguarded as she launches herself through manic cycles of physical exertion – as if unaware or immune to anything beyond herself. Théret’s face, however, is a bitter mask, staunchly controlled and self-aware. I would like to find resilience in it, but more often it’s a look of resentment, of someone begrudging a situation over which they have little control. When her movements fall into step with Heyward’s, it doesn’t feel like cooperation so much as surrender; her agency subsumed by the persistence of the other.
The choreography combines glimpses from a familiar lexicon of classical ballet with sequences of exaggerated gestures that at first appear rapt by some urgent purpose, only to dissolve into futility. Torsos flop over straight legs with arms dangling, then straighten up, hands swung over shoulders as if to scratch an itch, only to flutter at air. Heyward scrambles against the black curtain at the edge of the stage, slapping the white wall behind it with no clear intent: a body reacting blindly, throwing out symptoms, growing hysterical, confused.
The music, a collage of field recordings and original compositions by I See You (solo project of Finlay Clarke, Still House Plants), passes through violence, play, and elegy; between close, crackly haptics and spacious resonance. There are onslaughts of distortion, screeching up against and teasing the border of what is bearable. There are cycles of tender singing, full-bellied then thinning into breathy trails and casually muttered asides that mock any slip towards sentimentality. Hoarse, fragile cello notes are drawn like blades. Later a jump-scare into hard, fast drumming and electric guitar sends a jolt through the collective body of the audience. A strobe light whirrs as Heyward thrusts her arms and chest back and forth, her body manic while her face stays eerily blank. Meanwhile Théret slouches on a bench, glowering, as if waiting resignedly for this episode to burn itself out.
The ending offers no straightforward or triumphant narrative of healing. Because neither, I suppose, does life. Instead, the piece leaves us with an image of fragile, tentative coordination. Visibly exhausted and panting, the dancers begin to make delicate loops with their arms, linking them together to form a chain that they transfer back and forth. The same strange opacity remains between them, but for the first time they appear invested in protecting something of the other. Rumbling bass rattles the loose fixtures of the room like a thunderstorm, or a train passing somewhere deep below. A lonely trumpet drifts. Still engaged in their cautious work, the dancers retreat lingeringly towards the back of the stage, and the lights fade.
Bryony Dawson is a writer, curator, and sometimes-artist based in Vienna. Her writing has been featured in PW Magazine, Plus Magazine, Frieze, émergent magazine, Motor Dance Journal, Corridor8, and on Montez Press Radio.
