The Greek choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou, formidable in visual composition, is back at Usine C. INK, a duo of men, yet far from being a small form as his technical prerogative is major, scales as a fishmonger would a father-son relationship, perhaps master-student. Metaphors, plunged into the unconscious — everything is, for real, very wet… — the work still plays on Western iconography. We find the tools of Papaioannou, and the mastery he has of them.
It is the sound, first, which pierces the darkness marking the beginning of the show. The sound of water, of a jet of water. And the curtain opens on an arc of drops, which laterally splits all the blackness of the stage, catches the light in bits, and falls on the leaning head of a man, from behind, dressed all in black, absolutely drenched.
We had seen it in the formidable Great Tamer, performed in Montreal in 2019: Papaioannou makes a kind of silent theater of objects, multiple objects. He composes a multitude of images, passing through archetypes, clichés, and even through visual histrionics that his talent makes him forgive.
In INK, the accessories are more neutral. Using a garden hose, water, a glass jar, a plastic plate, an octopus-shaped fabric, the noise they make as the only music, the two performers invent a series of clever games of children where the fundamental notions of physics — weight, starting, accelerating and stopping a movement, balance or reversal, fall, empty and full — become choreographic material. The images thus constructed take on several meanings, leaving the one the viewer sees in them to be affixed to them.
Raw contrasts and binarity are part of the themes: the mature man dressed all in black constantly present and the naked young man who appears and disappears, like a ghost or a hope. They are father and son, certainly. Lovers, sometimes. Master and pupil, master and slave. Gestures and movements are utilitarian, or survival, without frills: moving objects, imparting movement to them, struggling against each other.
What a theater can accommodate
And it’s a show great technique, which pushes the limits of a theatre. Water flows, in large quantities; we walk under the floor; the walls resonate. There is a pragmatic and touching beauty in seeing a theatre, here Usine C, thus serving the creation of an imaginary and its requirements, deploying its material possibilities. It’s spectacular. It’s rare, in dance, in Quebec.
The composition of the images ofINK is also built in a technical way. Sometimes the hitches are touching, later undermine the rhythm. The first part is masterful. But the great visual creativity that we are witnessing does not escape verbiage, especially in the second part, where the tone changes a lot.
The gap between these two chapters causes an impression of a slight free fall. And as the show progresses, the moments when the images produced, which are always effective, do not speak, multiply.
And the change in tone is radical. Loud music, red lights, relational excesses, search for domination, we almost go to the grotesque. If we adhere less to this narrative development, we like to see a father-son relationship playing with overflows, excess and excess. That too is rare, when we no longer count the representations of an excessive mother-child relationship.
These flats do not spoil the pleasure. Dimitris Papaioannou is one of the great composers of scenic images of our time, of the caliber of Crystal Pite and Romeo Castellucci, in his own way. INK is a good show. Go for it.