The Other World is Making Merry

Avshalom Pollak Dance Theatre is premiering “Krump.”  It is their trump card and it is about a ruler but… not about Trump

One corpse is hanging on the wall, another one is limp on the throne, the arm dangling from the armrest, the coquettish black allonge – a wig with locks of hair reaching to the shoulders – suggesting that his Excellency welcomes you to the age of absolutism. A group of frolicsome goners look up from behind the screen and instantly hide behind it again.

Avshalom Pollak’s admirable dance performance “Krump” is a blend of all epochs and genres, a good ground for whatever fantasies spectators might want to indulge in, a world adorned with elegantly configured patterns of the minuets and folk legends. Some minuets they are, – lovers of contemporary dance lament – doesn’t krump mean a style of hip-hop which was born in the 1990s in the streets of Los Angeles where angels never alighted? It is believed to be a kind of African tribal dance – authentic, very powerful, very expressive, no-nonsense dance – but its macabre aggression turns out purely positive.   

On a serious note, however, “Krump” is a complex tangram with pieces falling together in such an ingenious way that emerging in-between them is something fanciful and fleeting, something having to do with history and literature – from times immemorial to contemporary – with philosophy and Avshalom Pollak personal story. The outer contour of the puzzle, its silhouette is outlined before the beginning of the show by a plotter which is put in the proscenium. The plotter is drawing something indiscernible on a big sheet of paper. This dancing figure, this evanescent matter, is transforming so rapidly that you begin to believe that energy can be expelled into the outer world only with the help of dance.

Pollak’s characters krump to their hearts’ content expelling all their inner demons. With some, they could as well be angels because you are hard put to decide whether it is hell or heaven you are seeing. Maybe, still an anteroom, the purgatory with souls still awaiting the final judgement. Charon here is a bent, frail figure with no boat to deliver the dead bodies, so he has to carry them on his own shoulders, groaning and limping. The fallen angel is playing the reed pipe posing as Euridice from Stravinsky’s ballet. The second corpse from the prologue, reminiscent of a suicide victim, all of a sudden turns out to be a royalty, who, like Louis XIV, who introduced the allonge fashion, has a bald pate under it. The bald pate belongs to Zvi Fishzon, the blessed mascot of the Avshalom Pollak Dance Theatre, the man without bones and nerves. When you see him, you give a sigh of relief – that means the Pinto-Pollak company breakup has not been so calamitous after all if its oldest dancer is still there.

In the world of the new show Fishzon is a king, and a jester, too. But who is the Prince of This World?  His trustworthy entourage is there but no smell of sulphur, so rest assured he is not a devil. Not a god either. Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun, as the French sang on a very different occasion?  Almost, but not quite – the King he is, for sure. He has two marvelous scenes: the King is suffering and the King is having a meal; in the first one the Ruler is listing all his ailments, down to the very last organ; in the second one – recounting dishes from all over the world – from hors d’oeuvres to desserts – making your mouth water and dishes ever more delicious for being named in French.

How, do you think, one can dance bodily disintegration? Well, just like that – wearing red panties slump in someone’s arms and fall down on the floor, then with a bit of a bone-rattling dance turn into a delirious artist from Symphonie fantastique by Berlioz, who, continuing his wild trip, turn into a character from Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita,” a victim of spilled sunflower oil; and then again, like lego bricks, get reassembled into a new body, roguishly pathetic and with fantastic plastique.

The dance does not hesitate to step over the threshold of pantomime – pantomime here is no more than a convention used for want of a better description, as is Pollak’s magic theatre. Price of admittance your mind, but no worries, though, – you get it back when leaving. But before you do, the laws of laughter will have been turned inside out, the dance will have been stripped down to its inner essence and much fatigued clownage will be have been  redesigned. The gothic of the story is smelted into the banners of Avshalom Pollak’s aesthetic revolution enhanced by ethnographic embodiment of primitive dances. Inhabitants of that world frolic recklessly, dancing in different styles – now turning into hominids, now into courtiers, dervishes, or shadow mime artists – their well-meant frolics convincing us that Pollak’s DNA is still recognizable that only he can compose such performances. Maybe Avshalom Pollak is the plotter scribble-scrabbling from the beginning of the show to the end creating a chain reaction and generating the spectators’ curiosity which remains unabated long after the show is over?

You have a chance to see it all with your own eyes on January 3 and 4 at the Tel Aviv Suzanne Dellal Centre. I suggest you grab the chance.

Photos by Avshalom Pollak