The Dancers Have Departed
Premiere, November 6, 2008
CaDance Festival, The Hague
The remaining tango dancers dance a last number, gather their things, turn out the lights, and close the door. A man and a woman remain behind, locked in. These two invisible inhabitants of the tango club wrestle with their memories and their fate, and pass from one powerful image to another, during a night that never seems to end.
The piece is an allegory about marriage inspired by the tango and the films of Ingmar Bergman.
After the performance the audience is invited to join in the milonga.
A performance for 18+ audiences.
The performance is the latest in a tradition of duets by Rosenfeld and Teixidó stretching back to 1986. All of these duets have to do with co-existence within a couple, each time finding new metaphors to describe the circumstances that couples sometimes find themselves in.
'The Dancers Have Departed' is the third part of a trilogy that also includes the duets 'So Much To Do' (2004) and 'Till We Lose It' (2006). Each of these performances confronts the issue of decay and death in a different way and context. The first part of the trilogy was a variation on the story of Sheherazad, describing a dancer who must dance for her choreographer or face certain death. The second part was a personal interpretation of El Quijote, in which one partner accompanies the other on his personal descent into madness and confusion.
In this third part, inspired to a large degree by the films of Ingmar Bergman, but also by the mood of the tango itself, Arthur and Ana simulate what it might be like to be 'dead', as a couple locked in a kind of personal purgatory. They are locked together in patterns of behavior that reflect the traumas and events of their 'real' past life, but which have now lost their original meaning. They dwell in a strangely beautiful world dominated by isolation, silence, cruelty, violence and a general sense of sadness. Whether the idea of being ghosts is to be taken literally or not is left open. What is clear is that this dream world is in fact on another level an accurate description of what many couples do experience: going through the motions of a life that has ceased to feel 'alive'.
Dance: Arthur Rosenfeld and Ana Teixidó
Concept: Arthur Rosenfeld, Ana Teixidó, Thomas Falk
Artistic collaboration: Thomas Falk, Wobine Bosch
Costums: Françoise Magrangeas
Licht ontwerp: Einstein Design
