Always the last
My first experience with the Ultima Vez Company, founded in 1986 by the Belgian choreographer Wim Vandekeybus, it was through his film Blush (2005). The experience was incredibly satisfying. The music by David Eugene Edwards, corrosive, disturbing and accurate, flowing through the dancers surrounded by red and black or wild nature environments, and left to their own stems, coward and inevitable, led me to delve into the creative Wim Vandekeybus art. Blush’s creative process is described in their own words with the same passionate way in which the viewer lives its vision: “In May and June of 2004 Wim Vandekeybus shot a 52-minute feature based on his successful performance Blush. Carried by the music of David Eugene Edwards and Woven Hand and with texts by the Flemish author Peter Verhelst, Blush is a dazzling voyage swinging between the heavenly landscapes of Corsica and the slummiest depths of Brussels. It is an exploration of the savage subconscious, of mythical forests, of conflicting instincts, of imagination, where the body has reasons unknown to the mind. In dance sequences of attraction, confrontation and repulsion the performers take on animal metamorphoses…”. And that trip wasn’t the last.
Last year, Wim Vandekeybus presented the piece Monkey Sandwich (2010). Ultima Vez is now on tour performing it while they are opening the new Radical wrong (2011), at the same time. The first one, the one we are here talking about, is introduced by Ultima Vez explaining “in Monkey Sandwich Wim Vandekeybus does not restrict himself to set patterns. His work is a fusion of music, dance, theatre and film, and this time the focus is on the last. The 21-year-old Damien Chapelle stands alone on stage and interacts with the fictional characters in the film. Although the emotional impact of the images outweighs any anecdotal element, it is a story about a man who tries to do good but causes great evil. For Wim Vandekeybus, this is to some extent a return to his roots, since he started out as a photographer. Nevertheless, the evolution of his work runs parallel to his investigation into the new potential of the body. How does the body change in a specific context? How can you act if your only opposite numbers are on a screen? Monkey Sandwich was inspired by unforeseen events, sudden twists and a fragmentary narrative structure. Not a million miles from urban legends, in which, as in this ‘monkey sandwich’ story, the truth often evaporates into fantasy”.
Like in many of his projects, Wim Vandekeybus gets back to a bioscopy process presenting his choreography in theaters along with the filming of a movie around the same piece. Set in Elko Blijweert music, the play moves between hilarity and madness in the field of the theatrical world’s lies, and artistic creation in general. He calls it a return to its roots in visual terms, but mainly as a new step in the evolution of body language. And his Radical wrong is already among us, like the first time, or even better.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photos by Danny Willems courtesy of Ultima Vez