Chronicle by Raoul Horn
Wim Vandekeybus ritualizes. It is also an excellent feature of the dance. But in this case, it's too easily called dancing. Vandekeybus behaves more like a director than a choreographer. His performances are narratives of the body. And Traces can be seen as opposition between body and mind, these being crossed by primordial, animalistic instincts of man. If man cancels his animal feature, he cancels himself, cutting down his own forest, the hiding place from which he came out, adapting to the weather.
The traces are those of a dystopian community. Each performer/dancer in the show has an excellent delimited corporality. Even if the dance is the same, everyone will keep their own genes, their so subjective twitching. Just like the bear's paw leaves its mark on the forest floor, the asphalt road also represents a trace, a flat one, of continuity towards a Where that always leads back to the wild geometry of the scene. The dancers, with their arms painted in white paint, agile, remain as if hanging on the air, and the deer they represent are fighting, mating, they are also fragile in all their impulse – careful, having got used to the road, they stop when they hear tires and engine buzz.
The bears that come on stage in turn relate differently to the members of the community. People put their sleeping mats together, share the same container with multiple roles – shelter, guillotine, they fight each other, then heal their wounds, love each other by intertwining their bodies in the white colour and moisture of the scene. From behind them the forest haunts. He's stalking us from the inside. The bears, in their turn, are forced to dance while the violin is played. In fact, they also offer massages before attacking.
A quite natural transfer of roles. You can't tell what's wild and what's not – a wide range of instincts. When the primary instinct is repressed, the man seems even more wild, onomatopoeic, constrained by smells and blood. What is the memory of a scream? The physicality of the instincts goes far beyond our attempt, those in the audience, to compose a concrete thought. We are left in the dark, lying on the ground, breathless. The bears in us and in the scene withdraw, but from the forest there are only stumps left that do not provide shade. Both the bear and the man need a protective shadow, which will allow them to unwind in the wild.
The febrility of the traces stays as a testament. Until the first rain and the reorientation of the road will cover them. But they are and will still be there, under the imprint, thus deepening more and more towards the vulnerable interior.
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“Theatre Chronicle @ Eurothalia” is a programme conceived by Daniela Șilindean together with the team of the German State Theatre Timișoara, within the Eurothalia 2023 European Theatre Festival, held between 20-30 September 2023, financed by the National Cultural Program Timișoara - European Capital of Culture in 2023.
