Ambitious show full of energy and bold as brass
En avant, marche!
(out of 4) By Alain Platel, Frank Van Laecke and Steven Prengels of Les Ballets C de la B and NTGent. Until June 24 at the Bluma Appel Theatre, 27 Front St. E. luminatofestival.com or 416-368-4849. Forward, march!
The command in the title evokes military precision and a linear sense of purpose, but it can’t contain the careening energy of this large-scale theatre/music/dance piece currently playing at the Bluma Appel Theatre as part of the Luminato Festival.
It’s a collaboration between two Belgian performing arts companies (NTGent and Les Ballets C de la B), joined by Toronto’s Weston Silver Band. On one level, it tells the simple story of an aging trombonist (the accomplished Flemish actor Wim Opbrouck) who’s dying of mouth cancer.
The setting, interpreted literally, is a brass band’s rehearsal. A narrative frame introduced in the first minutes allows us to understand the production as the trombonist’s morphine-induced hallucination. His comic grappling with a demotion to cymbals player stands in for his struggle to accept his mortality. Some might find the cymbalism a bit heavy-handed.
A better way to approach the show is as a piece of contemporary postdramatic performance: an occasion for a bunch of things to happen that will evoke strong feelings and thoughts but may not add up completely, and which will address the audience directly and attempt to create a unique feeling of liveness and community.
The seeming aimlessness of the entrance onstage of seven central musicians (members of the Belgian company) is galvanized when two nice middle-class ladies (Griet Debacker and Chris Thys) strip off to reveal spangly majorette uniforms and start snapping dozens of wooden chairs open.
Turning such seemingly incidental noise into rhythm and then into something beautifully tuneful becomes an ongoing trope under the superb musical direction of Steven Prengels. The score combines symphonic and operatic compositions by Wagner, Verdi and Schubert among others, along with some traditional tunes and even a little ABBA.
Opbrouck’s linguistic abilities are remarkable — he moves between English, French, German, Italian and Flemish, and perhaps a few others I didn’t catch.
But the words he’s given to say feel obvious: “I’m lost,” “I’m so lonely,” some quotes from Dylan Thomas and Yeats.
There may be ironic commentary intended about the melancholy narcissism of this central male figure, but it doesn’t come through clearly in this show created by men (directors Alain Platel and Frank Van Laecke, Prengels and dramaturge Koen Haagdorens). Opbrouck spitting water onto the stage and particularly all over those scantily clad, adoring women goes over the edge into indulgence.
Such scenes near chaos are cut across, however, by passages of musical sublimity, as when the full band of more than 30 players takes the stage and plays Elgar’s “Nimrod.” The switch of tone and mood is captivating.
The show, for me, is at its most effective in its second half, as physical and musical ideas are extended in ways that engage the audience in their risky playfulness: the band beats rhythms out of the chairs, their instruments and each other; the amazing dancer Hendrik Lebon per- forms a pas de deux with the remarkably light-on-his-feet Opbrouck. Here, the choreographic talent for which Platel is renowned worldwide gets to shine. There may have been too many cooks in the creative kitchen, so that the show’s impulses at times counteract each other. But it’s bold as brass and like nothing else you’ll see on a Toronto stage this year — exactly the kind of fare to hope for from a high-profile international festival such as Luminato.