"In the beginning there was nothing". The man in a checkered lumberjack shirt and with a soft Flemish accent speaks his semi-philosophical words about the origin of the world in a continuous line. It is a quality that will color the dynamics of the entire performance. A beautiful undercurrent that propels everything forward and links it organically. Even when the big bang sounds. Even when the timidly started song The Garden by Einsturzende Neubauten goes off the rails. Even when the dancers become increasingly entangled.
After productions inspired by heroines from stage literature (1: SONGS) and the grand dame of early minimalist dance (2: Dialogue with Lucinda), the German-Dutch choreographer Nicole Beutler has focused on another great theme with 3: The Garden: the relationship between nature and culture. They are understandings to which all kinds of opposing notions are connected. Nature is chaos, culture is order. Culture is literally and figuratively a step further than nature, a source to which (romantic) people now and then want to return. Beutler takes a closer look at this separate thinking with an original and bizarre image and movement language that are elaborated down to the millimeter and very musically.
On a rug between two rows of trees, four men and two women in underwear move like the stones in a magic lantern. In a mixture of dance, yoga and, in the distance, kamasutra, they form symmetrical patterns and figures. The stylization in this Garden of Eden is perfect. She is about form and energy, things that you can connect to how galaxies and oceans came into existence. And yet she is not correct. You do not associate this order with primal soup and the primal power of nature. Very gradually, Beutler reverses the alleged logic. Microphones emerge from under the leaves. Behold the human being, who cries out his desire, paints himself as a warrior and changes with others into a pumping mating organism of free love. Only now is the chaos there. Is this the back-to-nature effect or what civilization brings about? "Nature" and "culture" have been mixed up quite a bit. Just like in Japan tsunami and Fukushima have become confusingly similar.