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The Right to Party

What are you looking for in a night out in the theatre? Do you seek beauty? The ethereal? That may be the case for most at a ballet, but CCN Ballet de Lorraine’s double bill at the Southbank Centre wants to bring us on a whole trip. Delightfully odd and unashamedly alternative, the night champions the work of Adam Linder and Marco da Silva Ferreira.

 

Performance

CCN Ballet de Lorraine: “Acid Gems” by Adam Linder / “a Folia” by Marco da Silva Ferreira

Place

Southbank Centre, London, UK, March 6, 2023

Words

Eoin Fenton

CCN Ballet de Lorraine in Marco da Silva Ferreira's “a Folia.” Photograph by Laurent Philippe

Linder’s “Acid Gems” takes inspiration from George Balanchine’s conceptual “Jewels.” It was one of the first full-length ballets without a story, and still packs houses since its premiere in the sixties. However, audiences shouldn’t expect to see any musings on French Romanticism or the jazzy roar of New York as seen in Balanchine’s work. “Acid Gems” sees a group of unitard-decked dancers enter the space in slow motion, one by one they are dragged off by henchmen and put into place to start the performance. The bodies are curious, wriggly, a very confused snake pit but with more lycra thrown in. 

Linder’s interest in the ballet vocabulary emerges more and more the further into the trip we go. Dancers begin to slip into lines and circles, they enter the suitable idiom with entrechats, arabesques, pas de chats—like the stiff soldiers of a corps de ballet. The vocabulary begins to become less rigid, more exciting, more neoclassical. There’s some very clear allusions to the group patterns of Forsythe and the chain-linked arms of Balanchine. Though under it all an oddness remains. It is unclear whether these dancers in their asymmetrical athleisure and matte lipstick are under duress or under a spell, whether they’re trapped or are revelling in a masochistic fantasy. There’s a lot going on in here, but Linder seems to delight in that. The kookiness of it all is sufficient to keep us hooked.

CCN Ballet Lorraine in Marco da Silva Ferreira's “a Folia.” Photograph by Laurent Philippe

CCN Ballet Lorraine in Marco da Silva Ferreira's “a Folia.” Photograph by Laurent Philippe

For “a Folia,” the stage is a pitch black void, limitless and ethereal unlike the confines of the pale box in “Acid Gems.” Through the mist dancers begin to assemble one by one, getting in touch with the ancestral act of going on an absolute rager. The title refers to a fifteenth-century tune which splices with Luis Pestana’s clubby score. The dancers, dressed in all sorts of rave-appropriate outfits kiki amongst themselves, dancing for each other in the nocturnal revelry. Throughout the work little groups form, small clusters of people tending to an invisible object before them. Whether they’re invoking ancestral visions in flames or snorting copious bumps of ketamine isn’t too clear, but surely they warrant the same end-result.

There’s a real liberty to da Silva Ferreira’s work. The dancers take up as much figurative and literal space as they please. The men are granted full permission to dance as effeminately as they desire, everyone is feeling the fantasy. This unapologetically queer tribe, who uphold each other in their ritual of liberation, dance as a company of individuals with the same pursuit. But the rare moments of synchronicity are very compelling. In one sequence the mass of bodies sway in the darkness like one moving organism, the rolling waves of a mighty lake or waving branches of an ancient tree. Must be really good ket.

Da Silva Ferreira states that “a Folia” explores “how a massive party can actually change the world.” While it may be easy to shrug off such optimism during a period of international violence, one begins to feel drawn in by the reel of the rave. If we all spent more time in our big, gay, glorious love puddles, dancing through the night, wouldn’t we all get along just a bit more? In a time where we are being pushed further and further into individualism by our algorithms and economies, to get together and party becomes an act of defiance. Raving is a right, one that the ancestors fought for. 

Eoin Fenton


Eoin (they/he) is a dance maker and writer based in Cork (Rep. of Ireland), and London (UK). They have danced across Ireland and London in venues including The Place, Project Arts Centre Dublin and Galway Cathedral. Eoin graduated with a BA in Choreography from Middlesex University in 2024 and began writing as part of the Resolution Reviews programme. They are a regular contributor to A Young(ish) Perspective. 

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