A picture of humanity: Maguy Marin’s May B.

Compagnie Maguy Marin at Sadler’s Wells, London
May 21, 2024

It’s not just a dance classic. Maguy Marin’s May B. is a theatre classic. Created in 1981, it’s a homage to Irish dramatist and novelist Samuel Beckett’s universe, but also a work that in many ways holds up a mirror to ourselves.

We meet the cast of ten standing alone. They approach each other gradually and warily. The space is filled with hesitations. There’s a sense of feeling each other out, like a group of strangers thrown together by circumstance.

Their bodies are old, heavy and stiff. But there’s a fascinating paradox. While not aesthetically pleasing in the usual sense that dancing bodies are, they catch the eye. At no point do they invite mockery. You cannot help but relate to them, to feel for them. Perhaps because we see ourselves or people we know. Whatever, you cannot take your eyes off them.

In their chalky, dusty clay make up, and with all initially in circa 1940s or 50s nightwear, the characters look very much alike. But the reality is very different. Initially awkward and pathetic, they increasingly reveal their individual natures and foibles. Little things count for a lot. A look, a gesture, and especially a smile, all bring personality to life.

There is no narrative in a linear or literal sense. Rather May B. is a series of sketches that recall, trace, moments in the life of any group. They come together, they fall out, they fight, they fall in love, just as humans have always done and likely always will. We see distress and tenderness. We see them party; indeed, excesses of all sorts. Comedy brushes easily against pathos.

More than anything however, there is the notion of travelling. A section towards the end is strongly suggestive of refugees and migration, but throughout there is a powerful sense of journeying through life, a journey that never stops moving forwards with small, sometimes clumsy, often stubborn steps. And a journey for which this strange crowd realise they need to come together and help each other.

Bodies may be aged, deformed even, but they sometimes move quickly as Marin employs a wide range of travelling movement: sliding and jerky, large and small, sometimes with sharp changes of direction. There’s much use of everyday gesture, both functional and expressive of emotion. Groups are sometimes very tight and there’s a surprising amount of unison work.

Apart from music associated with Belgian commedia dell’arte-like carnival characters, the Gilles de Binche, Franz Schubert lieder and by Gavin Bryars, the dance is punctuated by breathing, laughter, cries and grumbles. The only words heard intelligibly are, “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished,” the opening words of Beckett’s Endgame. There are also clear nods to Hamm and Cloy from the same play, and to Pozzo and Lucky from Waiting for Godot when a man appears with another on a leash.

For the most part, however, and although references abound, Marin does not attempt to directly reproduce material or characters, but rather evokes topics frequently found in his Beckett’s writing such as solitude, silence and waiting, the difficulties of relationships with others, and perhaps more than anything, restlessness.

Although made over forty years ago, it’s easy to attach contemporary meaning to what Marin shows us, especially in a later section that shows a straggling line of dishevelled people, now dressed in ‘40s and ‘50s daywear, battered suitcases and bundles of belongings in hand, trudging ever forward. The scene is likely a personal reference to Marin being the daughter of Spanish migrants. “The issue of immigration affects me in a very intimate and very personal way,” she once admitted.

But equally, it reflects where we all are, making our way through life, which is unexciting most of the time, moving on, as best we can. When they discover the edge of the stage and help each other down, it is remarkably heartwarming.

It ends beautifully to Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, a composition based on a loop of an unknown homeless man singing a brief improvised stanza. A request for peace, it’s simple yet remarkably eloquent. On stage, one dancer remains. Facing the audience. A long gaze. There’s sort of an exchange of looks and thoughts as the light slowly, very slowly fades.

May B. A picture of humanity. A picture of everything that makes up life. A depiction of a journey to who knows where. Perhaps a journey that actually doesn’t have an arrival. Still powerful. Still a classic.

Read more about May B. in Maguy Marin’s conversation with David Mead.