Abstract:
Il ballo is a theatre-dance performance in which the characters, prisoners in a room—a metaphor for the world—attempt to make sense of their lives. This “puppetry” or “pantomime” represents deserted and empty lives. Prisoners of their own social habits and conventions, both in a physical and mental space, they struggle not to succumb to the rules and logic imposed upon them.
Details:
The performance combines elements from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos (No Exit), Luigi Pirandello’s Enrico IV (Henry IV), Bruno Schulz’s Sklepy Cynamonowe (The Street of Crocodiles), and, above all, Zbigniew Rybczyński’s short film Tango.
The action of Il ballo [The Dance] takes place in a room with concrete walls resembling a prison cell. The arrangement of the doors and the window, the table on the back wall, and the box in the foreground strongly resemble the setting in Rybczyński’s short film. Next to the window is a slanted frame without a picture (or a mirror).
In the beginning, a young man named Jason sits in the corner and recites a text by the Greek poet Konstantinos Kavafis, who speaks of walls surrounding him. The famous song “Send in the Clowns” by Stephen Sondheim, sung by the trio The Tiger Lillies, plays. After this prologue, eleven characters come on stage in their underwear and proceed to put on their costumes: the mother, the teenager, the boxer, a seductive and flirtatious woman, and so on. Additionally, a red clown nose circulates among the characters during the following actions. One character, Vasco, explains the rules of the subsequent acts, supervises their observance, and controls the music. He wears an apron and occasionally carries a clipboard, resembling a doctor or scientist experimenting.
Vasco announces an “infernal dance,” “a useless eternal repetition,” and plays Maurice Ravel’s “Boléro.” This piece repeats the same rhythm and the same two themes unchanged 18 times in a row, changing only the instrument. Each character repeatedly performs their action, partly with and partly without language. These individual actions run concurrently and do not reference each other. Each one obsessively repeats their movements, representing triumph, disappointment, resistance, narcissism, and so on. While no single action is absurd in itself, the choreography appears senseless as a whole. The constant repetition makes all the characters seem like automatons in an unrelenting mechanism. The individual actions progressively accelerate.
Periodically, a character abruptly interrupts the dance, and the music stops. One figure disrupts the actions with a shrill scream and is met with laughter from the others. The music resumes, and the individual actions restart. Another character interrupts with a type of epileptic seizure or nervous breakdown, removing a corset they are wearing. Two other characters help put the corset back on, and the character is again subjected to laughter as the individual actions and music recommence. A third character seeks an escape, a fourth character searches for a mirror to view themselves, and so on. However, no one can alter the mechanism in the long run because everyone eventually readapts to it.
Furthermore, each time, the “spoilsport” is suppressed by the others in an increasingly brutal manner and forced back into their usual action. Ultimately, one character writes, “Hell is other people” on the wall. Finally, another character replaces Vasco as the game master.
