National Ballet of Marseille
“Sprawl to the wall” may be a Los Angeles concept, but Metapolis II, which the National Ballet of Marseille presented in September at the Lyon Opera House for the Biennale de la Danse de Lyon, created an indelible vision of a modern city stretched to the limits. And then some.
Originally made in 2000 by Flemish choreographer Frédéric Flamand, artistic director of the National Ballet of Marseille since 2004, and Zaha Hadid, the prize-winning, Iraqi-born architect, the 70-minute, intermissionless work has been rechoreographed with the help of the dancers. Metapolis II was seen last summer at the Marseille Festival before being mounted at the Biennale, one of the world’s great dance festivals, whose theme this year was “Dance in the City.”
In this case, the municipality is Hadid’s sumptuous, silver-colored set: Three graceful arches—bridge-like curves that interlock—are maneuvered around the stage by dancers, who assemble myriad configurations as if playing with an erector set. When first seen, the arches resemble a futuristic haystack à la Monet, and the performers lunge and leap to an electronic score that occasionally recalls the ticking of a metronome.
This throbbing-heart accompaniment (an uncredited pastiche that also references Messiaen and “O Sole Mio”) proves an ideal soundtrack for the lush video imagery projected at the rear of the stage. Whether delivering live feeds of the dancers or pictures of X-rayed baggage and exploding buildings, this piling-on of images reinforces the notion of the multitasked, endlessly complex life.
A woman in white—exquisite Katharina Christl—stands atop the structure as prelude to a short, lyrical pas de deux with stellar Lionel Hun. Valentina Pace enters on pointe, her attack crisp in a Matrix-inspired coat (Hadid also designed the costumes, including one-legged bodysuits, geometrically patterned leotards and a pillowy skirt). When dancers flaunt red bracelets and green sticks, waving a large green cloth, Star Wars meets The Emerald City. Dancing sprites populate this magical village, which could symbolize the green of prosperity or simply a grassy park amid stark concrete.
Indeed, as scenes from urban life play out in this work that also features snippets of text, different costumes and colors come to signify future worlds. The trio of bridges morphs into tableaux—utopian or not—that include a geodesic dome, a pristine igloo and a structure that suggests a lunar fire escape, climaxing in a solitary yurt-like dwelling.
Finally, though, it is the 20 dancers consistently performing fluid, clean moves—bourrées, trance-like spinning or contorted thrashings—who help elevate us above the mundane, where standardization and the malling of cities have burdened us with a robotic, repressed sense of doom.
Hadid and Flamand (the latter has a theater and contemporary dance background as opposed to a classical ballet vocabulary) have triumphed in physicalizing the space we know from our daily lives and, by transferring it to the stage, they allow us to ponder issues of intimacy, excess, fragility and beauty.
Victoria Looseleaf is a freelance arts journalist who contributes regularly to the Los Angeles Times, La Opinion and Dance Magazine.
