Fever Dream Logic

Eschewing a conventional film narrative, Labyrinth of the Unseen World created in collaboration by French filmmaker Amelie Ravalec and Scots/Irish dance artist Paul Michael Henry, instead fuses visual poetry with dance performance, creating a hallucinatory, disturbing, yet beautiful dreamscape. There is nothing as prosaic as dystopia sci-fi here; rather, the film seeks to interrogate human consciousness itself. Because of the fever dream quality, the film is presented in fragmented scenes, juxtaposing fear with hope, beauty with decay.

Performance

Labyrinth of the Unseen World, a film by Amelie Ravalec and Paul Michael Henry

Place

Words

Lorna Irvine

Paul Michael Henry in Labyrinth of the Unseen World, a film by Amelie Ravalec and Paul Michael Henry

Henry emerges from a primordial Earth, all at once a short-circuiting shaman, Dionysus and wounded warrior, en route to self-actualization. His eerie, somnambulant voiceover alludes to feeling dissociated; more animal than human, seemingly cast adrift in a hostile environment. Nightmares and reality begin to blur.

Humanity is eroding and despair itself crawls off alone in order to expire. Language seems finite and circadian rhythms shot. So he must test himself against that which would seek to destroy him. He becomes a master of kinbaku, here, divested of its eroticism. In his hands, the ropes that tether can be shaken and bitten off, a metaphor for escaping certain doom.

There are antecedents in the film. Certain images of animalistic grotesques are akin to the Grand Guignol; others, in Expressionism. I am often reminded of Damien Jalet's peerless choreography for “Yama,” in which dancers, resembling arachnid-like creatures, emerged from a giant hole in the ground. Or perhaps it feels akin to the potent, devastating Goya exhibition, Los Desastres De La Guerra, featuring the inescapable devastation of war on civilians. Trees seem to spout limbs, a red moon is a heavy portent of doom. Icy figures populate the land, yet add little in the way of comfort. Hell, it seems, has truly frozen over.

Paul Michael Henry in Labyrinth of the Unseen World, a film by Amelie Ravalec and Paul Michael Henry

How then to navigate this phantasmagoria, and emerge unscathed? By facing the challenges head-on. Henry, now freed from the ropes, pushes forward, one delicate step at a time. The butoh sequences seem highly apposite for the tearing down of walls and the rebuilding of a new world. Only butoh effectively demonstrates the duality of human nature. Butoh, all sharp contours, contorted and intense, is capricious by definition: it rejects the rigidity of restraint. And so Henry, with the fluidity of ritualized yet shapeshifting movement, back arched but head aloft, ascends through rough terrain. His hands are elegantly raised but spiky as tendrils. He is primed in readiness for self defence, ready to pounce.

He finds his way towards a black horse, and both man and beast undulate together gracefully, swinging with metronomic precision. As horses feature in Buddhism and Christianity, it's not hard to draw a through line to the symbolism of power, humans interacting with totemic beasts.

So what of the exit? Once able to communicate with a noble beast, the pathway is clearer. The nightmare becomes a lucid dream, and Henry's escapologist now has agency. A flower bursts into life, reminding the viewer of the endurance of nature, which always somehow finds its way through the cracks. Visionary and poet William Blake once wrote, “To see the world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wildflower” in his “Auguries of Innocence.” Perhaps this is after all the resilience of the human spirit, the sense of time, place and endurance, mirrored by the movement of human bodies in dance, a dance of hope, strength of will, and transcendence. All we can hope for as humans is a soft landing upon reaching the other side.

Lorna Irvine

Based in Glasgow, Lorna was delightfully corrupted by the work of Michael Clark in her early teens, and has never looked back. Passionate about dance, music, and theatre she writes regularly for the List, Across the Arts and Exeunt. She also wrote on dance, drama and whatever particular obsession she had that week for the Shimmy, the Skinny and TLG and has contributed to Mslexia, TYCI and the Vile Blog.

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