GRAND SINGE (GREAT APE) by Nicolas Cantin

“Grand Singe“

Reviewer: Jemima Yong
Performance: 22 January 2015

Two bodies move; a man and a woman; repeating, then embellishing physical motifs. Sometimes, they move together; most times they are ships passing in the night.

This score of pedestrian choreography is structurally musical.

On several levels, the piece feels like a transplant. Firstly, there is an unnatural chasm between the performers and their movement material. The performances appear ‘on the surface’, as if the dancers were taking on movements organically created by other bodies.

A Q&A with the company later confirmed that this was indeed the case.

In addition, this reviewer notes a distinct disconnect between Grand Singe and the attending audience. Choreographer Nicolas Cantin likens the process of making the piece to reattaching fragments of a shattered porcelain cup that has broken in pieces. The notion of dance being able to transcend the boundaries of language falters here, as the piece interrogates culturally idiosyncratic milieu. No doubt, the company tries to connect; the performers greet us in Mandarin, they speak in English instead of French.

But sadly, this is just not enough.

I spend part of the performance trying to imagine: what if I were watching Grand Singe in another country – in Germany, the UK, France? I imagine more laughter from the audience, more acknowledged playfulness in place of the apparent confusion. What ways can a work like this be re-contextualised to better engage a distant audience (in every sense of the word)?

There were moments, where the audience and dancer saw eye to eye. Notably, the sequence with a pink balloon:

A dancer blows up a pink balloon until it bursts – We jump. We laugh – He pulls out another pink balloon from his pocket – Oh no, here we go again – He begins blowing into this one, but this time, holds off just before the balloon hits maximum capacity, letting some air out every time he takes a breath – He teases us for a while, plays with our anticipation before the second balloon bursts – Collectively, we jump, again.

Grand Singe plays quite a lot with presumed expectation of the audience. But at this showing, much of that anticipated expectation wasn’t there. This audience relates to bodies; our bodies and the bodies of others differently, we relate to abstraction differently, we relate to nudity differently. Grand Singe feels more incomplete than intended.

Most of this experience was a garbled monologue; not quite a conversation.

I leave the theatre speculating on the moments (or so I’ve heard) that have been taken out (perhaps by censors, perhaps by the artist, it is unclear). I wonder what those moments were, and how they might have influenced my experience if left intact. At the end of the day, it is difficult to evaluate Grand Singe knowing that it was, in fact, incomplete.