Ode to unpredictability

For the past decade, the iconic British choreographer/dancer Jonathan Burrows and the Italian composer/musician Matteo Fargion have been collaborating on work related to the late John Cage’s ideas. Two short productions, One Flute Note and Counting to One Hundred focus on Cage’s Lecture on Nothing, resulting in enthusing, joyful tributes to unpredictability and the act of moving. “There is nothing to say, and I am saying it,” thus opens the 1959 score by the highly influential American composer. This statement runs through Burrows’s and Fargion’s actions in One Flute Note like a leitmotif. The gentlemen appear to want to suggest that nothing special is happening, but they are just doing it anyway. What may otherwise sound fatalistic, evokes freedom, unpredictability, and joy in this wondrous production. Alternating between an ironic sketch and a strictly intellectual reflection on contemporary dance, the two gentlemen dance short series of nonsensical movements. Just like Cage, they play with the field of tension between polar opposites like silence and non-silence or the expected versus the unexpected. The latter unavoidably incites laughter from the audience. Burrows and Fargion had already brought Counting to One Hundred to the Kaaistudios last season. Here too, a Cagian principle results in an exciting, intelligent, and humorous production. The central question is how one entertains the audience with a piece of work that consists of nothing more than counting to one hundred. Keeping to a strict rhythm – Fargion emphasises his composer side more here – we again see the two performing simple movements. Burrows talks, not in words but in numbers. Though we think we know what to expect, Burrows and Fargion constantly deceive us in a production that appears to have an unfathomable structure.

Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion: One Flute Note + Counting To One Hundred • 7 > 9/2, 20.30, €12/16, KAAISTUDIO’S, Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Vaakstraat 81 rue Notre-Dame du Sommeil, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-201.59.59, tickets@kaaitheater.be, www.kaaitheater.be