The Great Tamer

Sadler’s Wells, London
October 16, 2018

Charlotte Kasner

Dance has long been removed from its original behavioural roots and, in theatres, presented as spectacle, one hopes in order to amuse, inform and sometimes shock. Dimitris Papaioannou‘s The Great Tamer does none of these. Indeed, it often seems to be without any purpose whatsoever, aside from creating tsunamis of self-indulgence, with the audience as victims.

There is a taste of what is to come as the audience is greeted by a single dancer standing downstage centre in silence. In a way, it sets the tone for the vague theme of mortality that runs through the piece, but with so much repetition and pointless disrobing in the work, it rarely manages to engage.

Taken at a sensible pace, the work might have only provided 40 minutes or so of ennui but, set to a tortured three-quarter speed murdering of the Blue Danube interspersed with yet more embarrassments of silence and some ear-splitting electronic screeches, it drags on and on and on and on.

A large amount of effort has clearly gone into the technicalities. The set comprises a ragged black floor raised asymmetrically at the back corners. It rather reminded me of local authority paving, neatly set up for multiple accident claims. Sections are often, ripped up, flipped over and dragged around. The floor’s dullness conceals entrances and exits, allowing dancers to appear to be swallowed up by the stage. Elsewhere, they roll around a lot and walk on their hands. One comes on encased in ceramics which are cracked off and swept up. Clever and enigmatic, but all for no apparent reason and thus pointless.

Two moments stand out. There’s a fleeting and genuinely funny reference to Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp which unfortunately is undercut by the tired old gag of pulling sections of innards out of the supine dancer on the table, and which are then laid for an elaborate supper. The other is the arrows. I’m not sure how it’s done but they are thrown up in the air with no particular aim, only to swoosh through the air, describing perfect arcs and thunk into the stage like guided missiles, where they stand quivering prettily. It made me long to stage a re-enactment of Agincourt.

One motif deserves special mention, not least because it provoked the most apt comment of the evening from an audience member sitting behind me. The opening dancer eventually stripped off, ripped up a section of floor, flipped it over onto its white side and lay on it. Another dancer walked on and flipped a diaphanous sheet over him as if covering a body on a mortuary slab. Further dancers then rip up sections of stage which waft away. It’s repeated to death (pun intended) and twice later in the piece. On the third repetition, the man behind me groaned “Oh dear god, no.” Quite.