At the entrance of the attic room in Theater Bellevue in Amsterdam, Arnon Grunberg, Charlotte Van den Broeck and their two fellow dancers Liah Frank and Rob Polmann nod a friendly hello to the audience. With their warm welcome, they immediately make clear that we should not expect a sacred dance performance, but a human encounter between two writers who venture far out of their comfort zone here.
However, the idea was their own. After Grunberg and Van den Broeck opened the Frankfurt Book Fair together in 2016, they wrote each other a weekly letter in this newspaper. Fear and shame were recurring themes. So the plan was born to do the most embarrassing thing they could think of: dance in front of an audience. They found a patient and generous conductor in the Dutch choreographer Nicole Beutler, so they wrote in the series of columns in which they reported on their adventure for two weeks.
Microcosm – a danced conversation opens with the four dancers in blue costumes on a blue carpet, surrounded by wooden walls. Starting from their toes, they explore the entire space, with a movement quality as fluid as water. The falling drops in Gary Shepherd's ear-pleasing electronic soundtrack make us feel like we are in an underwater world. The dancers swarm around each other, half improvising. In addition, they always just don't touch each other, as in a game of Doctor Bibber.
Van den Broeck – with the hair in a bun, nails painted red and two tree tattoos on the arm – is clearly more agile and has a greater body awareness than Grunberg, who compensates for this with his roguish look and uninhibitedness. He briefly plays a game of tennis with an invisible racket and ball. It is one of the rare concrete moments in the otherwise abstract choreography, in which the foursome embodies the microcosm in our bodies – from single-celled beings to symbiotic organisms (depicted with entangled limbs).
After fifteen minutes the language comes in. Grunberg says aloud that he suspects that some spectators hope for gloating with the dancing writers (that's not that bad: they worked hard and there is a liberating energy in their imperfection). Van den Broeck describes what it does to her, usually still, writer's body to dance. “All cells fill with air.”
Every now and then you can still see the movement assignments and some scenes could have been developed further, but as a whole Microcosm is an enjoyable dance performance. It's over after less than an hour, but the joy of dancing is infectious.
Read the original (Dutch) article here: https://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20220223_98101657