Skin Divers & Carmen: sexier than the hottest bedroom

Heather Ogden and Noah Long in Carmen

On Saturday, June 6, *Skin Divers* & *Carmen* brought sexuality to the Four Seasons stage to rival the hottest bedroom. Skin Divers opens the senses to the body’s power to remember, and the mind continues to process it long after curtain. While this multimedia piece is sophisticated and stimulating, Carmen overwhelms audiences during the second half of the evening. This provocative interpretation of the famed opera is an eruption of passions so powerful they cannot be processed, simply absorbed.

*Skin Divers*
Performed by dancers of the German company, Kevin O’Day-Ballett Mannheim, Skin Divers physicalizes the poetry of Toronto-local Anne Michaels. The poet’s recorded voice speaks her works, “Last Night’s Moon” and “Skin Divers,” while eight dancers perform the choreography of their company’s associate director, Dominique Dumais. The ballet debuted six years ago in Germany at the Berlin Ballett-Komische Oper. Now, Toronto welcomes back the French-Canadian choreographer who began her dance career at the National Ballet School of Canada. A string quartet performs music composed by Gavin Bryars, while four men and four women dance with video projections of nude figures and wind-blown curtains reminiscent of tangled sheets.

The set and costumes designed Tatyana van Walsum evoke sensuality through minimalism. Dancers are wear nude or earthy colours in light, transparent fabrics that emphasize their bodies – the commonality of the human form – over individual appearances. The set is a collaborative effort between lighting designer Mark Stanley and van Walsum. A massive video screen veils the stage in the first piece, and dancers perform behind projected images on the transparent sheith. In the second piece, the set is an arc hung with delicate white strips of fabric no thicker than tulle. Both sets act on their own to evoke sensuality, from the moment the first dancer walks out, emerging from a bush of pubic hair on the screen. Four couples dance behind images of nude forms, breathing deeply.

Each couple’s dance in “Skin Divers” has its own dynamic, one raw with violent sexual force shown, another longing in the close, clinging steps of two people who want to be one. The poet speaks, "We hold the ones we love or long to be free of.” And our bodies remember. Dumais’ dance does not illustrate a narrative for the audience to follow. Rather, it releases the human experience – of things held in the body, inexpressible in any medium but skin. “Waterworn, the body remembers like a floodplain, sentiment-laden, reclaims itself with every tide.” In that memory, we seek to transcend – not necessarily to escape but to find ourselves part of memory, in it or leaving it behind. “We’ll never achieve escape velocity, might as well sink into wet firmament, learn to stay under, breathing through our skin,” writes Michaels. “Under water, under sky; with transparent ancient wings.” It is this need to transcend, to be in or escape, that Dumais brings back to the audience in a motif gesture, hands fluttering at arch of the back, by turns frenzied and ethereal. In this, her dancers express the human experience, and they understand their roles well. They do not develop specific characters or communicate actions. Rather they emote, none stealing focus from the whole.

A curtain descends on stage, white sheets hanging from a bar, and “Last Night’s Moon” begins. Dancers are no longer in couples or groups as before. They flit in and out of the windblown curtain, so delicate it’s like negligee. “If love wants you; if you’ve been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills, with warm blood and cold. With feathers and scales.” Love is metamorphosizing. “If love wants you, suddenly your past is obsolete science.” It is the human commonality – our want, our joy, our pain and need. And bodies remember every mark from every love, long after we’ve taught our minds to forget. “In your hands, all you’ve lost, all you’ve touched . . . In your skin, every time you were disregarded, every time you were received.”
In this marriage of movement and poetry, Dumais and Michaels seem to be soulmates. They express each other. The effect is a rarity: art that slows its viewers’ breathes and reminds them of what they’ve forgotten in order to function. It is a new language of catharsis, the emotional cleansing of the audience.

*Carmen*
In Davide Bombana’s new Carmen, the Italian choreographer pares the Romantic opera down to its most basic elements: passion, pride and sex. Nineteenth century composer Georges Bizet made the story of the insatiable whore famous, but through propriety and gender expectations, it’s been diluted. For the original premier three years ago in Toulouse, Bombana stripped the story of pretence and told it simply as a competition of whose lust is greater. The result leaves audiences gasping for breath.

On opening night, National Ballet principal Heather Ogden danced the leading role with style, precision and fervour. But Noah Long, as her would-be lover Don José, commanded the stage with his reckless passion and uncontrollable desire. His rigid posture beside Sonia Rodriquez as Michaela, the woman who loves him, leaves no doubt that their relationship is dead, even as she languidly stretches over his body and clings around his legs. The other rejected lover is played by Robert Stephen, who puts a bad-ass edge on the role of Garcia. As Carmen’s tattooed pimp, he infuses the steps of a ballet dancer with brutish crudeness. The effort in that characterization is a little strained but Long achieves the contrast he seeks from refined roles in traditional ballets he’s done.

Sound editor Silvio Brambilla mixes the classic Bizet themes with urban percussion by Tambours du Bronx that pound the primal instincts driving the story. They are by turns hostile, daunting and the sexiest sounds in the Four Seasons. Brambilla also mixes in works by José Serebrier, Rodion Schchedrin and Meredith Monk. His atmospheric combinations add to the set and lighting designed by Dorin Gal. Her set seems basic, a half-moon of transparent plastic framed by black bars, but it offers powerful versatility. She maximizes it with lights that shift the mood and intensify focus as characters make fateful decisions.

Gal’s lighting design is not subtle. It often washes the stage out in blacks and white, broken only by a bar of red near the floor. During Carmen’s pas-de-deux with José, the world around them turns a deep blue, almost periwinkle, as they come as close as they will get to loving each other. Then, Garcia walks in, and the light disappears – back to the harsh discourse of sex.

Ogden flaunts her physicality with fierce focus. She is dedicated to the role, and it shows in her every movement. Ogden’s professionalism shows up early in a fight scene with soloist, Lise-Marie Jourdain. Although Jourdain plays the part of the catty co-worker with attitude, she lacks the conviction in her muscles and sharpness in her point that Ogden sustains.

It is with Escamillo that we finally see Ogden revel in Carmen’s reckless desire. Played by Jonathan Renna, Escamillo is a bull, the embodiment of masculine power and virility. He enters, enters Carmen and leaves her spread eagle and writhing on the ground. Ogden abandons her ballerina poise, intact until now, as Carmen abandons her will to the bull and the stage washes red. After he leaves, she dances with ferocity, born out of desperation. It’s fiery enough to match Long’s portrayal of rage and despair. His anguish shows everywhere - his face, his exhausted posture, his lax hands and slack knees. Yet, his muscles are taught with mad jealousy and his movements sharp with the insanity of continuing desire. Driven by a passion to act – even self-destructively – Carmen fights him, runs from him and finally runs at him, into the dagger that killed Garcia, into her death. She impales herself and collapses. José is left alone, trapped in his grief. His dance is so frenzied, he seems about to tear his own arms off. There’s nothing graceful about the way he embraces her, not even loving. It’s desperate and clumsy. Her limp body falls through his grip, and he collapses, rocking with a dead whore’s hand on his head.

_Skin Divers and Carmen ran June 6 – 14, as part of Luminato 2009, a National Ballet of Canada production at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts_

By Roselyn Kelada-Sedra