Dance On Ensemble & Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop: A Sky Like A Wall

Berlinische Galerie, Berlin
December 1, 2024

It was an unusual but quite engrossing hour and forty minutes. A collaboration between Dance On Ensemble, a Berlin-based professional company for dancers over 40, the Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop, a group dedicated to developing new forms of experimental music theatre, and author Rabih Mroué, A Sky Like A Wall proved an absorbing evening of sights and sounds.

Inspired by scores, studies and texts in Mroué’s Notebook of an Unspecified Colour, written specially for the project, and in an allusion to the story of the Tower of Babel, the work sought to consider how it is possible to speak different languages and still communicate, and how can culture’s lack of capacity for dialogue be addressed.

You could take or leave those themes, and A Sky Like A Wall certainly made no judgments. It was more than possible to just enjoy the dance and music, and indeed the Berlinische Galerie, for what it was, although the first was clearly visible in the way the dancers and musicians worked together.

Danced in everyday clothes and trainers, the performers had a wonderful knack of appearing from nowhere and vanishing just as mysteriously, melting into and out of the audience. Created by the performers, the dance itself was wide-ranging in style: angular and full of technique, distorted and everyday, loose and full of control, free and intense.

The audience were free to wander as they wished, drawn to different spaces, rooms by music, voice and other sounds as if being called by some Pied Piper. Or perhaps, as I was, by the fleeting glimpse of a dancer in a corridor just before they vanished into a side room.

Following, like Alice chasing after the White Rabbit, I found myself the sole observer of a brief solo. Some sections did appear to allow for an element of improvisation within the structure. I’ll swear the dancer was playing some sort of hide and seek game with me, peeking childlike round a partition before vanishing once more. ‘Come on,’ she seemed to be saying. ‘Follow.’ And you do, or at least try to.

Some moments just seemed to be a playful response to the music, none more so than an opening solo by Marco Volta. At first glimpsed crossing and recrossing a doorway, he emerged into the space, his dance clearly a conversation with the violin, his urban and hip-hop influenced movement, which sometimes drifted on during a musical pause, like a reverberating echo, an intriguing contrast to the sound.

Some scenes were rather more an enigma. A female dancer performed around a cellist. But it wasn’t long before she was trying to interact or at least gain her fellow performer’s attention, at first moving beneath the cellist’s chair, and then somehow squeezing between musician and instrument. As they became increasingly tangled, you wondered who was actually playing.

Sometimes there was a clear tension, as in a solo that saw a woman move agitatedly back and forth, arms aloft then falling to her sides once more. Was she looking for someone. Or trying to be seen? Or, taking up one of the evening’s themes, simply trying to communicate.

Strangely compelling were a couple who appeared several times, marching through the space and through scenes, side-by-side as if joined at the shoulder.

There really was something interesting at every turn. Time after time, dancers and musicians come together only to disperse. Transitions were sometimes unexpected but always seamless. The musicians dance too, creating a new dialogue between the art forms.

Part of the delight of the evening was stumbling on something special such as the performer who seemed to be dancing with her own shadow as she faced a wall, apparently moving to distant music. Seen only be a few, it was unexpectedly moving.

The music also came from afar for a super, beautifully fluid male-female duet that saw the two dancers twisting and turning, circling around and feeding off another. Hands were especially detailed.

Almost all the moments were solos or duets, the latter sometimes two dancers, sometimes dancer and musician but there were scenes when larger groups formed.

With musicians located on and around the central staircase (what a shame we weren’t allowed upstairs to get yet another perspective on happenings), the dancers gathered in the space below. As music filled the museum, individuals seemed initially buffeted by it but then, perhaps coming to understand it, to be able to communicate with it, surfed its notes and chords almost lyrically. There are even moments of unison. But when the music then sounded like a building be demolished brick by brick, so the dance fell apart too.

I found myself watching this through a gap between wall and the underside of the stairs. Just one more example of a fabulous new perspective appearing by chance.

Later, against a wall, the performers come together to build a tower of bodies. They sing, their bodies a slowly writhing form. As they leave through the onlookers, they whisper. It’s barely more than a breath, words not at all discernible.

The fascinating collage of scenes and sounds engaged fully for the whole 100 minutes, all watched over not only by the audience but by the rows of portraits the form the gallery’s current exhibition by Rineke Dijkstra that line the walls. It says much for the performance that I barely looked at them with the exception of Almerisa, a series of photographic portraits starting in 1994 with its eponymous subject as a 6-year-old girl refugee from the war in Bosnia, and which tracks her transformation from anxious child to elegant woman and mother. It was very compelling.

It was also an evening when all sense of time was lost. One in which not just the performing arts, the dance and the music, but also the space itself and the visual art on the wall came together in harmony. Plus, of course, the audience. A Sky Like A Wall would never work without them. I would love to think this was not a one-off and that it could be repeated in other galleries.