Thirty-six rooms, one dance work of astonishing creative exuberance
Rooms Rambert ★★★★★ Rupert Christiansen
‘Le confinement ” is what the French call lockdown, and perhaps it’s the word that accurately suggests what we’ve all been feeling over the last year or so – restricted, cloistered, living in echo chambers. And that’s one of many resonances passing through Rooms, an enthralling new work devised by the Norwegian choreographer, playwright and film director Jo Strømgren, and livestreamed until Sunday in performances given by the 16 equally versatile dancers of Rambert. I doubt whether anyone could fully account for its import, but I can guarantee that you will never have seen anything quite like it.
Over an hour and some 36 different episodes, filmed with seamless fluency in Rambert’s London base, Rooms passes through a wide range of moods and images, seldom coming to rest for more than a minute. Fragments of speech and polyglot conversations make up the soundtrack alongside a score that ranges from Purcell to Glenn Miller and house music. The cast must impersonate at least 100 characters, and Strømgren calls upon its members to act as much as to dance – a challenge they meet with effortless virtuosity.
What’s it all about? Not, you will be relieved to hear, the pandemic, except in terms of the idea of confinement. Perhaps the underlying thread – it can hardly be called a theme – emerges in one of the few sustained scenes, in which a sociologist is being interviewed in a padded studio by a radio jock. The sociologist deplores what he calls “metro-insularity” and makes a plea for a recognition of human diversity that reaches beyond current political clichés into a more sympathetic understanding of our differences and what we all share. In any case, the radio jock doesn’t listen – somebody keeps tapping on the glass and posting calls for his attention.
If this sounds heavy-handed, it isn’t: Strømgren paints with the lightest of touches. The scene merely serves as one possible clue to guide us through the dreamlike parade that alternates between the comic and tragic, the beautiful and sinister, the erotic and violent. There’s no real logic to what connects the rooms: Strømgren seems fascinated by the disjunction of experiences that are actually happening simultaneously and contiguously.
Three Hasidic Jews dance to a klezmer band; next door a control unit has them under surveillance, its operatives fighting over Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Hooded victims of an auto-da-fé jump from a window to their deaths – and next door to that is a teargassed riot.
There’s a Rubik’s cube competition; a birthing class in which women examine their vaginas with speculums; an appearance by King Kong, shot at by Sanders of the River in a pith helmet. We all exist in our own little rooms: how often do we know what’s happening on the other side?
Finally, as the prelude to Lohengrin swells transcendentally, we are confronted with death: a lone suicidal figure contemplates a noose hanging from the ceiling next door to a grieving couple lying on a bed clutching an urn containing the ashes of a lost child.
Attempting to reduce such material to rational coherence risks making it sound like pretentious nonsense. But as one watches Rooms, the sheer creative exuberance is irresistible.