STILL LIFE

Alan Lucien Øyen's Still Life: visions of ethereal beauty

Dansens Hus in Oslo is situated outside the city centre and built over a fast-flowing stream surrounded by trees. Alan Lucien Øyen’s Still Life takes us one step further into nature in a work where bodies find their primal state, lights and sounds create visions of ethereal beauty, and the space opens to the unconscious and the irrational. Øyen is an artist in tune with performance art in its widest sense and this is another of his choreographies where he takes the art away from any codified constraints to wander in Elysian fields.

Øyen in addition to directing his own company, Winter Guests, is Artist-in-Residence with the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet. His two dancers are well chosen: Daniel Proietto, a longtime collaborator, is joined by Mirai Moriyama, a dancer less known in Europe but with a high profile in Japan. With background knowledge in Kabuki, Butoh, contemporary dance and film, the dancers are the focus of the work and on stage for most of the evening.

The Still Life of the title is better understood as nature morte and relates to our cavalier attitude to the natural world which is being decimated in man-made disasters. However, it is the dance that is central and totally riveting. The choreography, by Øyen, is created in close collaboration with Proietto and Moriyama, dancers who have a fine-tuned understanding of their bodies. Simply dressed in black trousers with bare tops their hair tied back, they move in ways that are thought-provoking and eloquent, underpinning the message that to be human is to be at one with nature. The relationship between the two comes across most strongly in the close contact duets where the bodies move to the same pulse.

There is a fluid quality in Proietto’s musculature, an innate knowledge that remains subliminal offering no resistance and making dance seem as natural as breathing. Moriyama is a dancer of magnetic presence. He brings an exciting level of physical energy to his dance, as he leaps horizontally, falls and rolls with animal power and expertise. The dancers, despite the sometimes athletic quality, never lose the connection with the interior, the source and the centre of power both physical and mental. Whether they are in motion or stillness, they remain eminently watchable.

The lighting, sound and visual setting are an integral part of this production. Used minimally but in a potent manner, they are a constantly changing source of inspiration and delight. There is magic from the opening semicircle of black clad singers intoning with bell-like clarity to the final moments as the stage is covered in glittering metallic foil. The dancers briefly don masks which extend their heads into bird-like hybrids creating unsettling but memorable images. The chorus make a final entrance, their head-covering masks topped with a tangled growth of roots and branches and lit by shards of golden light conjuring the mysterious powers of nature.

It is in the images that the work communicates most strongly. The text, written by Andrew Wale and Øyen, is delivered on walkie talkie devices and opening on the banality of everyday chat: ‘Hello, are you there?’ ‘Yes, I am. Where are you?’ When the text has content of significance, it becomes difficult to usefully process within the density of detail in the production.

There is not a moment when design, (Aida Vaineri and Øyen) score (Henrik Skram) and sound design, (Mathias Grønsdahl) are not important. The grainy air surrounding the dancers seems thick and even murky, when smoke effect is used, it rises like tumbling pillows of cloud. Golden cloaks used by the dancers and chorus are made from a metallic foil that gives a rustling sound effect as well as its brilliant sheen that almost blinds in the rays of light. In the final moments the backdrop of a seascape is briskly lowered, the two dancers now simply dressed in brown trunks make their last dance, close and slow, like a devoted elderly couple. The entire painted scene drops to the floor as a sheet of golden foil is rolled out to cover the stage area. The effects are mesmerising and amazingly beautiful.

It is the quality of the dance that carries the evening, with the important message of climate inaction more hinted at than clarified. There is much to enjoy in the performance and probably a lot more to gain from further viewings to unpack the layers of complexity in a very dense work.

Radical choreographers Alan Lucien Øyen and Rafael Palacios present two very different but beautifully poised explorations of what it is to be human

The theme of this year’s Venice Dance Biennale is We Humans, and the idea is providing a strong sheltering umbrella for a programme of thoughtful and engaging work.

In Still Life, by the Norwegian Alan Lucien Øyen, and Behind the South, by the Colombian Rafael Palacios, two radical, committed choreographers present pieces that beneath their obvious contrasts – one cool and cerebral, the other with an accelerating pulse – are beautifully poised explorations of what it means to assert humanity in the face of different oppressions.

Both men have wide hinterlands of research, theatre and activism, and it shows in the way that they are prepared to use dance as a tool for thought, without ever losing the sense of its physical expressiveness.

On a smoky, darkened stage, Øyen places two remarkable dancers, Daniel Proietto and Mirai Moriyama, in dialogue, their voices echoing through handheld amplifiers. Proietto, in silhouette, moves his hands and arms like a blind man groping in darkness. Moriyama crouches beneath a piece of foil, describing the movement of ants. When the words stop, they simply move, their steps communicating a sense of panic and things slipping away. Moriyama stands framed in a cone of light, separated from the natural world, lost in a place of his own making, his movements jerky, frozen. Later, he surrounds Proietto with a pall of smoke as the dancer spins in tight circles.

The images are arresting, creating a lingering impression of a world in constant decay, where people are separated from nature and from one another. Towards the close, a cloth depicting the sea drops from above; at the very end, the men are stranded on shimmering wave, clinging together, for survival and for love. It’s a wonderful work, packed with emotion and ideas, melancholic but never depressing, an acceptance of entropy and change.

The Venice Dance Biennale will have highlighted certain talents like Cristina Caprioli, Golden Lion of this edition, or Alan Lucien Oyen. Without forgetting the public success of the duo Guy Nader and Maria Campos.

Alan Lucien Oyen, for his part, seeks the animality in each of us. "Still Life" plunges the pair of exceptional dancers, the Japanese Mirai Moriyama and the Argentinian Daniel Proietto, into a "bath" of sensational images. Masks on their faces, they move in harmony, their fluid gestures seeming second nature. Sometimes surrounded by a cloud of smoke or caught in the decor of a painted canvas representing a raging sea, the performers end in unison for the duration of a false sad waltz. The text spoken through a walkie-talkie from another era does not have the same force, alas. Alan Lucien Oyen has already collaborated with the Tanztheater Wuppertal or the ballet of the Paris Opera, without always convincing. "Still Life", more modest in its form, seduces with the quality of the movements deployed, worthy of the talent of Mirai Moriyama and Daniel Proietto.

Alan Lucien Øyen: “Still Life”

At the Venice Danza Biennale, titled We Humans by Wayne McGregor, its artistic director, a superb show by the Norwegian choreographer alerts us to the death of nature.

Still Life , which means Nature morte in French to designate a style of painting featuring objects – often plants, immobile – is inspired by a phrase by Andy Godsworthy: “We often forget that we are nature. Nature is not a thing separate from us. So when we say that we have lost the connection with nature, we have lost the connection with ourselves.” Alan Lucien Øyen explained to us in a recent interview, while he was in the middle of creating this piece in Kobe. And it is true that in our so-called “hyperconnected” era, this is a real paradox. Because faced with this dying nature, it is we who remain motionless, like the living dead waiting for the final blow.

On the stage, Daniel Proietto, the Norwegian choreographer's favorite performer who studied traditional Japanese dance at the highly regarded Fujima school, and Mirai Moriyama, a dancer, actor, and star of Japanese cinema and television series, embody this idea, as well as a choir recruited from each city visited. Here, then, ten remarkable Venetian singers. These characters are like bearers of the voice of the world or of nature, words always having great importance in Alan Lucien Øyen, less for their meaning than for their flow, their undertow one could almost say. In keeping with the composition of Henrik Skram and the sound design of Mathias Grønsdal, who bathes Still Life in a sound effect where the sea competes with the sounds of the forest.

Øyen's bias, which consists not in placing on the stage a sort of manifesto-show but on the contrary, a duo of great beauty, is a real find. The dance, a duo of men of great sensuality and mad tenderness, wind and unwind with a flawless fluidity, constantly underpinned by immobility as an underlying force of inertia. The scenography, all in vapors and mists crossed by rays of light, brings forth hallucinatory images while Proietto and Moriyama deploy their hybrid bodies, and whose extreme organicity could bring to mind plant ramifications, plant or animal branches, trees or deer in their tangles of busts and arms.

Moreover, here they appear towards the end, the choir wearing elegant and sophisticated headdresses of "wood" which remind us that we have voluntarily driven ourselves out of this definitively lost Paradise where we were one with nature on this Earth, which we continue to implacably destroy.

The finale, where a painted canvas representing the ocean falls to the ground to be soon replaced on the ground by a survival blanket with golden reflections whose shimmering effect is marvelous, sums up all our inconsistency, or how to replace the original sea with an expanse of plastic, as shiny as it is suffocating.

SEARCHING RESIDENTS ON A POST-APOCALYPTIC PLANET

What can we do against the digital violence that increasingly dominates us? With two dancers, Daniel Proietto and Mirai Moriyama, and two short interventions by a choir, internationally renowned Alan Lucien Øyen searches for possible alternatives in his new dance performance, on show during Julidans.

The choir and dancers enter without much ceremony as the lights in the hall dim. The chamber choir forms a semicircle and sings what sound like fragments, around the two dancers who are intensely but motionlessly turned towards each other. The image of the two men, eye to eye but at a distance, will return regularly in the performance. The physical resemblance and identical costume of the dancers suggest that they are each other's mirror image... or perhaps the ultimate mutation of the human species.

After the locally recruited and somewhat unfamiliar choir has finished its humming chants, the dancers continue separately. They speak to each other through walkie-talkies, suggesting an immense distance. The dialogue is about location and not being able to reach each other. 'Where are you?' is a question that is asked again and again throughout the performance, and is in fact reflected back to the audience.

Still Life takes the audience into a dark universe, a post-apocalyptic planet that floats freely and where there is always a night that is illuminated in a surreal way. The two inhabitants have lost their way, are searching, the question is what.

The body as a toolbox
In a series of duets that alternate with (short) solos, the two seek support from each other but also get in each other's way. The dance idiom, which makes sparing use of Japanese butoh elements, stimulates the spectator. If he or she can switch off the automatic need to search for meaning, the body becomes a toolbox that appears to contain ever-changing instruments.

One person’s hand can move another person’s elbow. A foot can turn another person’s knee. Or should we assume that the human body will be reduced to a collection of prostheses in the future? Analogously, the performance shows our planet as an object that is no longer illuminated by the moon as we have always known it, but by a series of moons that create an artificial constellation in the background.

The unreal atmosphere conveyed by the performance is evoked by the extraordinary lighting plan by Martin Flack. This succeeds in making the sources of light invisible, and at other times allows very visible lights to move along with the actions on stage.

The many short sequences do not follow a compelling pattern: the order, length and switching between the different parts seem rather coincidental. This could be an illustration of the search and wandering that Øyen wants to present to his audience. However, it leads this spectator astray. Still Life offers few points of contact.

A painted seascape
When, after more than an hour, in the second half of the long duet, a painted seascape falls across the width of the stage, the reason for this remains unclear, although in a later scene one of the men is buried under the cloth. Is this an illustration of the saying après nous le déluge? After these scenes, text plays an important role, but it is not easy to understand.

Towards the end of Still Life, the choir makes its (predictable) appearance again. They wrap themselves in golden rescue blankets. Both the choir and the dancers are later adorned with antlers and snouts, have taken on an animal form. Perhaps that is the suggestion the makers wanted to make: if we want to be saved, we must return to a natural state of being, in which we accept that for nature we exist only as mammals among many other species.

The very last scene brings the two dancers together in a deliberately awkward duet. Perhaps that is the point of view Alan Lucien Øyen wants us to take away: that we are nothing but fools in the face of nature.

STILL LIFE BY ALAN LUCIEN ØYEN

Butoh as an image of our time, as a figure of a humanity that has lost contact with nature, that lives in a grotesque suspension surrounded by a virtual reality. Still life, in fact, even if we translate Still Life as “still life”. This is the starting point of the new work by Alan Lucien Øyen, one of the most versatile Norwegian artists, writer, director and choreographer in residence at the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet, but acclaimed at the Opéra National de Paris, where in 2022 he opened the dance season at the Opéra Garnier, as on the stage of Wuppertal, where he was one of the first artists after the death of Pina Bausch to create a complete work for the Tanztheater. The moving duo in its Italian premiere at the Tese dell’Arsenale in Venice integrates stylistic elements of Western contemporary dance with elements of Butoh to express the “living death” to which we are adapting, but also to indicate a way out in the rediscovered relationship with the living world that surrounds us. Which means first of all rediscovering a relationship with ourselves and with others. Øyen writes:

Nature is dying and in the meantime we are paralyzed, blocked in our immobile lives: we live but we continue to die. From the windows of our little rooms, we scrutinize life atrophied by the constant echo of our desires, while millions of data are reworked and resold to us as advertisements for lives we would have liked to live: connected, disconnected.

Still Life by Alan Lucien Øyen (ph. Mats Bäcker)

In front of a painted landscape, the two extraordinary, close-knit dancers, Daniel Proietto and Mirai Moriyama, look for each other, listen to each other, support each other, while reciting a text composed by the same choreographer, accompanied by a chorus of voices. Still Life is a meditation on the ever-increasing distance between the world and the people who inhabit it, with scenes of cinematic imprint and solutions of emotional impact. Like the non-human living being that appears masked and dancing among the smoke, or like the silvery sea obtained with the same material of the emergency blankets that shortly before had been used to cover bodies on the ground with an eloquent call to the rescue of immigrants: the steps and breathing of the two performers are amplified in a delicate sound fabric.

Still Life by Alan Lucien Øyen (ph. Mats Bäcker)

But the show is also an attempt to reveal, through the bodies and their naked language, a true presence, offered without defenses and pretenses, without that constant concern for the opinion of others that forces us to construct an image of ourselves, a narrative of our life through which «we rewrite our daily life in the form of anecdotes and stories for the appreciation of the pack: other human beings.» We see the dancers' search for sincerity, which evidently shines through on stage only as the result of a long practice of mutual listening. An exercise in empathy to feel existence in fragility, in falling, to be able to focus our gaze on «a flower growing in a puddle». Sprints, restrained leaps, decompositions of figures, slow letting go from one body to another following the impulses in their rise but also in their waning. A practice of abandonment that reaches peaks of touching effectiveness thanks also to the hypnotic music of Henrik Skram and the powerful lighting design of Martin Flack.

Also at the Biennale Danza, the show Still Life by the Norwegian choreographer and director Alan Lucien Øyen would at first seem to go in the opposite direction. His performance is in fact a reflection, at times almost a restless elegy, which concerns the natural environment, the boundless spaces, and man in front of the cosmos of which he is a part. Two dancers, Daniel Proietto and Mirai Moriyama, weave a continuous dialogue – made up of both movements and words – between themselves and with the context that surrounds them (almost never depicted, but always evoked: a peak to climb, a forest, at a certain point even the virtual network of the web). Every now and then, they are accompanied by a choir that, thanks to the harmony of the sounds, perceptively surrounds the bodies at the center of the scene, which move with a non-affectionate lightness, with an always controlled decision - allowing the lighting to outline and highlight the muscle bands. Still Life has an illustrative, vaguely naturalistic process. Also, at least on some occasions, subtly disturbing: the contemplation of the cosmos and of man's place in the world becomes at a certain point a dark rite (the members of the choir wear masks and the stage light is tinged with red), to recall the close link between the sense of the sacred and the shadow of violence. In all respects, sanctifying something - as nature can be - means experiencing an atavistic fear of it, if not horror, at the same time visceral and reverential. What is striking, within the contrasting "subject" treated in the two shows, is the apparent complementarity of the titles: moving towards the territories of a "cyborg" ethic (almost more than an aesthetic), exploring the promises of new artifices and new technologies, Nicole Seiler nevertheless chooses to put the human ( Human in the Loop ) at the centre of her proposal; Alan Lucien Øyen with Still Life , although starting from a vitalistic hint and crossing telluric and sidereal scenarios, nevertheless decides, or proposes, to freeze life, to ensnare it, to finally contemplate it in its most abstract and machine-like aspects.

(...) This joyful, panicky and rebellious spirit is the opposite of that which animates Still Life by the Norwegian Alan Lucien Øyen in which the distance between man and nature, between contemporaneity and one's roots is felt as poignant.

Still Life could be translated as still life. Øyen, through the wonderful interpretation of Mirai Moriyama and Daniel Proietto , sings of the desperate need for understanding, the pain of separation, the loss of contact between oneself and nature. One constantly feels the scent of the end, of a Western thought that has lost its identity and cannot find solutions for the future. And this feeling of separation, of disorientation is poignant thanks to the dance of Moriyama and Proietto who draw strength and expressiveness from the tradition of Butoh dance, in which the dancer must feel like a dead man among the living. Such is the expressive force of these two dancing bodies that every other element becomes superfluous and even harmful. Such appears the repeated coming of the chorus that distracts us from the empathic communion with the bodies of the two dancers, and this happens especially when the word is inserted, hard, assertive, logical. By wanting to say too much one ends up confusing a speech that was already clear with the simple gesture. Despite this, we have witnessed moments of touching, impeccable, moving dance.