Alain Platel’s Out of Context: the beauty of fragility & imperfection

(picture:(c) Chris Van der Burght)

The end of Platel’s latest performance shows us a desolate stage where the dancers have dressed and left the scenery. The light is full on, a pile of folded orange-red blankets reminds us of their presence: all in it’s nakedness, even the wall curtain has been withdrawn. A voice is singing that no one compares to the lover that has gone and you wait for the blackout…that doesn’t come (you have instinctively prayed for that not to be done). You’re grateful for that one of a many little details and hundreds of hands are reaching for each other.

That’s why I unconditionally like Platel: for reading and misguiding our minds and making things happen out of scrap and nothing. It is mostly what he does in ‘Out of context’: emptying our minds to utter craving.
The nine highly skilled dancers impersonate characters and themselves seeming to have forgotten everything about dance. They dance as if dance didn’t exist and for that reason urges to be ‘inventend’ or least recomposed in fragments from bits and pieces, from scratch.

Quite confronting to see them move in frenetic gesture, contortion and almost reaching for each other. Platel is boring us to death -that is what I thought on the spot, but he draws you into their minds and then it becomes very rewarding to look at the beauty of fragility and imperfection.

Out of context is out of context: emptying movement, disregarding space and time, so un-narrative and abundantly disrupting the music-to-gesture approach. It is arte povera in stead of meticulous minimalism . It is generous, a feast of failure&lust.