Look; What ’s coming in from the outside!

Fountain statues can’t have sex, even though a lot of them seem to be in eternal anticipation of it. They stick out their divinely formed behinds, rotate their torso’s, and arch their backs in a softly sloping curve. But the other bodies, to which they stretch out their arms, they never get to reach.

With Mette Ingvartsen in Pact Zollverein, the five dancers seem like fountain statues, or sexless androids, or some prehistoric ritual. Entangled in each other, and head to foot wrapped in icy blue cloth, they put the statue sex in motion. Cloth covered mouths move about between the legs of others. Blue heads fold into their necks. Organs move toward each other.

It is a plain bizarre, but perfectly composed, and at the same time completely carefree sensuous choreography that Ingvartsen presents as a premiere in Essen. The Danish choreographer, trained in Anne Theresa de Keersmaeker’s P.A.R.T.S, now moves up and down between Brussels and her home country. She is just only 25 years old, and created her first choreography in 2002 with a well developed dance idiom of her own.

Simple and full of associative power, her new piece as well narrowly revolves around its theme: sex and its imagery. Stereotypes and endless possibilities, freedom and templates, sensuousness between lust and making a dash for it. The three female and three males bodies covered in icy blue come up with an assembly line of images and postures. Cool groups like in 18th-century erotic illustrations, solitary bronze statues, Benetton advertisements, sex machines going about their ways in each other as if they were the lighthearted cogwheels of a jean Tinguely piece. Worlds of associations shine behind the images, everything appears for a split second: blind coveting and refined sensuousness, alone or in group, love and violence, tenderness and boredom.

Sober and precise in her directing, Ingvartsen imposes herself a strongly varying inner rhythm, has the bodies run in silence and freeze again. When later on the dancers show up as normal people, lining up as if for choir singing, bringing the belated sound of the images: groaning and panting, the effect is once again alienating. Like the covering of the whole body and a refreshing humour the alienation robs the sex game, maybe not of its sensuousness, but certainly of unambiguousness, to open it to a refined and unending reflective echo game between nature and culture, imagery and reality.

- Gesa Polert, Rheinische Post, June 4 2005 - translated by Tom Hannes -