Prior to seeing Rites, I’d only ever seen live one other of Matthew Day’s works: Thousands, a fantastic piece that demands everything from the audience as it forces your participation through refusal. Judging by the presentation last Friday evening (4/7), Rites is a pretty strong continuity of the same aproach. Obviously, this consistency is a hugely helpful tendency for producing cogent bodies of work, but it’s also a difficulty, especially when Day attempts, as he has in Rites, to synthesise such a clear working practice with an approach to form that isn’t actually reconcilable with his own. There’s contrapuntal sympathies between the surface-ness of Nijinsky’s choreography and Day’s own apparent ‘go inward to go outward’ work process, but the mismatching of depths is just too present.
Rites is an exploration of the theme of ritual, rebirth and sacrifice displayed in Le Sacre du Printemps, morphed into a vision of denying darkness from whence the infinite supposedly emerges. A proposition: to dive into blackness is to find the gravitational singularity. It’s quite a theatrical work, seeking to create a microcosm of sensuality, and moving in his characteristic repetitious style Day picks his way around a blackened performance space, dulled by woolen curtains, lit just barely enough to see flesh, iridescent in the haze. There are some beautiful images – I couldn’t help but think that Rites would photograph really well – and Day moves with a present sexuality that I find deeply attractive. He is less of charismatic performer than a magnetic performer – it’s definitely hard not to watch him deep in the process of bodily instrumentation because he is so sexy. The presence of sexuality, specifically a gay man’s sexuality which is an idea he paid attention to in Thousands (Donna Summer anyone?), is beguiling and a little sleazy. It’s a great match to the images of sex and death in the original 1913 production of Le Sacre du Printemps.
But in terms of a compelling theatre experience, for all the transformative detailings of set, lighting, sound and scent (a stick of Japanese incense is lit to really tell youthis is a ritual), Rites achieves none of the commanding presence of Day’s other work. I think this is because this piece is still an early experiment for him exploring new modes of presentation – primarily, the mode of actually having to recognise that an audience is present. More on that momentarily.
I mentioned depth before, and here’s the followup. While much feted, justifiably for its challenge to form, and subsequent influence, Le Sacre du Printemps has nonetheless dated enormously as a dance to a wonderful programmatic score. The work follows a close narrative framework that can be read in light of clear movement titles within the score. As a choreography it is unusual looking and notable for its clearly groundbreaking lack of specific direction – group dynamics are slack and chaotic, almost like Nijinsky just said ‘dance’ but didn’t say exactly how – but in many ways, it is an aesthetically focused ballet that offered new forms but not necessarily new conceptual modes. Le Sacre du Printemps is a relic of sorts, albeit a great looking one. My sense of trouble in seeing Day take on Nijinsky’s choreography (not sure if he’s really taken on the score – James Brown’s sound seemed so intensely disarticulated from Stravinsky’s original) creates two queries: 1. What’s the real pertinence of this work to him as a modern (not modernist), conceptual artistic subject? 2. Why bother with it when your practice is so internal, and Le Sacre du Printemps is such a colourful and externalised experience?
Without being reductionist, from seeing Thousands and now this piece, it’s so clear to me that Day’s primary philosophy for dance making resonates deeply with the Buddhist principle of sunyata. I really feel that the central proposition of Thousands was ‘to whomever emptiness is possible, all things are possible’. Indeed, as Day asks himself, ”If we were able to remove human conciousness from the centre of the universe, what new relationships, materialities and potentialities emerge?”. Given the outward and extroverted nature of Nijinsky’s work, I think there might be some big issues to sort through before confronting that choreography with its radical opposite.
In Rites, I see an image of Day being torn in two directions – towards the outside, to the audience who strongly desire your direct action and attention, your readability, and towards the desire to go inside, for cultivation of the individual soul. As modes of engaging a crowd, they are so different and the point of synthesis, where Rites might truly begin to be the performative ritual it seems to aspire to, is evasive. The result is a work that is aesthetically pleasing, physically careful and exploratory but that doesn’t understand how to express itself.
The flat denialism of Day’s earlier work is a simple but highly (deeply) effective tool for engaging the small psychological movements of a watching audience. In a way, Matt has attempted to evince similar reactions in Rites by trying to travel inward to the theatrical space of big production values, trying to replicate his ego and psychology at the level of a ‘full show’, the same energetic platform used by Nijnsky, but what’s problematic is how his presence struggles to make itself felt among the maelstrom when the actions undertaken to do so inevitably begin to abandon the principles that made Thousands so upsettingly fantastic. Ultimately, Day’s work in Rites cannot be sunyata, the central active practice, for the activity demarcates ego through the endorsement of old choreographies. Jumping, mouth agape, as the dancers do in Nijinsky’s classic, I’m presented with a distinct surface image of Matt, but not ‘just as he is’.
I like this new direction, and the self conscious effort it represents to add further complexity and difficulty to a practice.
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Rites was part of Keir Choreographic Award: Program One
Dancehouse, 3/7 – 6/7
