Contemporary dance, and in particular post-dramatic dance theater as represented in the work of Norwegian choreographer, director and filmmaker Alan Lucien Oyen, has developed its own iconographic gestures in its circles around mourning, loneliness and death.
One of them is the eruptive, idiosyncratic solo, the dancing that seems to have been born of some kind of inner distress in a help-seeking code of outstretched arms, ducking upper body, buckled knees.
In addition, there may be a turning as if in dizziness or very high free legs in an arabesque as if in an attempt to regain sovereignty.
A fight against the hardships of life, carried out with a headset whose allergy-free adhesive strips for attachment are sensitively adapted to the skin tone.
The intermittently pressed out words, wrested from life and movement, are easier to understand, and the intensified breathing noise as proof of an increased pulse rate lends the movement events additional dramatic emphasis.
The distance between the exhausting actors and their silent, distant spectators is shortened even further by transferring the oversized face to the screen behind the scenes via live video recordings.
disorientation of the audience
This is exactly how the first minutes of Alan Lucien Oyen's new play "Cri de Cœur" play out on the wide opera stage of the Palais Garnier in Paris.
The generation that is used to creating closeness and intimacy through pictures is portrayed here.
Their difficulties in establishing stable connections with other people, their refusal to grow up by not being able to stop looking back at their childhood, their reluctance to really cross the threshold of responsible adulthood, their inactive sad loneliness, their loss of reality, all of this emerges from the spoken texts as well as from many of the play's dance theater scenes.
When the young woman, who initially steps alone in front of the curtain, breaks out, if the man she hasn't even met today enters the elevator, she would wish him to leave.
Instead, terrified and heart pounding by an imagined encounter, she disappears as quickly as she came.
The softening feeling of stillness
The curtain rises and Marion Barbeau, the young first soloist currently appearing in the cinema in Das Leben ein Tanz, dances as the actress of an injured ballerina from the Paris Opera, who is finding herself again in contemporary dance and in finds healing.
That sounds cheesy, and it is - no less than the way in which Oyen now uses them for his dance theater.
He is not concerned with physical injuries, but only with the sensitivities of a "generation of talk therapy and osteopathy".