The audience is ruthlessly dragged onto the emotional roller coaster of the dancers
After the extremely dark productions in the trilogy Memory Loss Collection and the exuberance of Joy, Enjoy Joy, balance is what Ann Van den Broek is looking for now. In The Balancing Act the Flemish choreographer makes her performers work hard to find that balance. They attain it, but they can lose it again just as easily.
There is a square frame around the white dance floor. The audience is seated around it. A square structure with video screens on each side hangs over the floor. Around the edges of the floor are 4 x 8 wah-wah pedals. The pedals usually used for music serve various purposes: to turn a video on or off, to start a sound fragment, or as a glorified light switch.
The eight performers each have a different way of handling the pedals. At times to calmly dim a lamp, at others to quickly turn things on or off with their high heels. Roughly stomping on them in their boots is also among the possibilities.
Imperfection is the normal state
Ann Van den Broek is not on stage this time. However, we do hear her voice which is also controlled by a pedal. She speaks in English about balance and breathing. One text is heard several times during the performance, and it is also printed on the T-shirt of one of the dancers: “I’m only human. I’ll screw up again and again”.
In Van den Broek’s world imperfection is the normal state, while the search for balance is mostly to stop them from falling down. The pedals the performers use to manipulate light, sound, and images only create the illusion that their situation is malleable and can be controlled.
The performers, dressed in gray tones, blue variations, and a few white accents, are put through a series of basic emotions by Van den Broek and in the process they discover new forms of balance and imbalance. From sadness to irritation, via fear and anger, to finally attain some form of acceptance. To get from one state to the other, the dancers work up quite a sweat.
Emotional minimalism
Van den Broek calls her form of dance ‘emotional minimalism’. The minimalism is reflected in the rash repetition of gestures, movements, and dance phrases that are always sparked by emotions. One moment it can be a simple yet compelling breathing segment, at others it is a longer, repetitive sequence with an assortment of gestures screaming irritation.
The performers are not the only ones put on an emotional rollercoaster. Supported by a tantalizing video and light design by Bernie van Velzen and the music switching back and forth between sadness and aggression composed by bass player Nicolas Rombouts, the dancers ruthlessly pull the audience into the breath of the exhibition. Panting and worked up one moment, calm and comforting the next.
Fritz de Jong, Het Parool, October 5, 2023
How do you find your balance in a world of extremes? That search is what choreographer Ann Van den Broek the search quite clearly
Under their blue, gray, black, and white costumes the eight dancers wear T-shirts with quotes that slowly reveal themselves. These are comments in English such as ‘create space’, ‘it’s a mind game’, ‘don’t make me sit still’ and ‘you’ll screw up again’. Phrases that offer support as well as confound and knock someone off balance, in the same way that it does not help telling someone who is stressed out to ‘relax!’
How do you find your balance in a world of extremes? Choreographer Ann Van den Broek presents the search quite clearly in The Balancing Act. In previous productions with her company WArd/waRD she created compelling forms of expression for extreme emotions such as unrestrained rage, personal loss, and exuberant joy. What she explores here is the delicate balance between all those extremes: how do you remain standing on wobbly edges?
Once again, the Flemish-Dutch choreographer presents a taut mix of movement, spoken word, music, and live video which has become her trademark. In the past she would regularly appear on stage to stamp a rhythm or to work the controls; this time the dancers are in control of the pedals. They control the sound levels, the focus of the camera for closeups, when to insert a heavy bass tone, a soft guitar, or a whining saw.
The five men and three women are agitated at first. They sit hunched over around the white dance floor, their hands covering their ears. They step into the arena in turn and sway lightly, trying to get a grip. That process slowly becomes smoother. And increasingly in unison. They become little guardian angels with a hand on a neck or an arm around a waist. And so, as a member of the audience seated around the dance floor, you too can enjoy surfing on the wave of enforced relaxation.
Annette Embrechts, de Volkskrant, October 10, 2023
The Balancing Act is winding path along considerable extremes
The Balancing Act by Ann Van den Broek is anything but a harmonious yoga session, but rather a compelling journey past extreme emotions.
“I aim to find a balance”, is heard toward the end of The Balancing Act. The sonorous voice belongs to choreographer Ann Van den Broek, who recorded most of the voice-over texts. After a period of exploring extreme emotions such as loss, intense grief, and delirious joy in The Memory Loss Trilogy, Ohm, and Joy Enjoy Joy, now in her new choreography she is in search of balance. If you suspect that this might produce a kind of harmonious yoga session, you do not know Van den Broek.
The emotional journey of five men and three women takes place in a setting that Van den Broek has worked with for some time: A square clinical white floor, over it a grid with white LED-lights, and on the four equal sides on the floor are a set of pedals that the dancers use to control the volume and intensity of the soundscape by Nicolas Rombouts and the lighting design by Bernie van Velzen. A rectangular ‘box’ on the grid over the floor is used as a screen for the live video-recordings.
The Balancing Act is a passage past considerable extremes that takes the audience on a winding path where fear is followed by insecurity, happiness by desperation, uncertainty by impatience, and once in a while we get a peek of serenity, connection, and peace. These don’t last long, of course; it never takes long for the dancers to perform a rhythmic, repetitive dance pattern performed with neurotic intensity, or for them to create a synchronous group sequence with familiar gestures of irritation and insecurity: A phrase that conjures associations with the famous choreography Rosas danst Rosas by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker.
Control
When the dancers are literally teetering on the edge of the floor, waving their arms wildly to stop them from falling, things seem to be out of control; however, Van den Broek has everything firmly under control. She likes control. Everything points to that in the dance idiom she has developed in the course of two decades. Here, too, we see the style she calls ‘emotional minimalism’, with gestures and steps that are often intense, tight, and measured, giving a large degree of clarity to the design, concept, and theme.
This urge to control creates a clear framework for the emotions that the dancers intensely display in front of the camera in closeup: Slightly insane (Nik Rajšek), furious (Anthony van Gog) or weeping (Marion Bosetti). The texts on the shirts that appear from under their clothing also express various moods: “How is my breathing”, “It is a mind game”, “Create space”, and a universal truth: “You’ll screw it up one day”.
Although all the different parts come together and the dancers take each other into their arms, in Van den Broek’s work it is imbalance that sets everything in motion. That is why her choreographies always demand an emotional investment of the audience, which in the case of The Balancing Act has been placed around the floor close to the action. As result there is no escape from the all too human condition of Van den Broek.
Francine van der Wiel, NRC, October 23, 2023