Trajal Harrell / Zürich Dance Ensemble, The Köln Concert, Sadler’s Wells East

Trajal Harrell / Zürich Dance Ensemble, The Köln Concert, Sadler’s Wells East, April 4

The challenge Trajal Harrell faces (and he seems to have taken it up) in using Keith Jarrett’s iconic 1975 Köln concert as a choreographic score is that the entire late-night concert was improvised, and although Jarrett later authorised a piano transcription, it’s impossible to re-capture the free-flowing atmosphere of that late-night concert in any form. As music critic Corinna Da Fonseca-Wollheim wrote, “without the live, improvised element, the magic is lost. Unlike a piece of classical music, “The Köln Concert” is a masterpiece only in its recorded format. And it requires an audience that participates in the unfolding act of creation each time anew.’

Presented at Sadler’s Wells East, Harrell’s The Köln Concert, created on himself and six dancers from his Zurich Dance Ensemble, perhaps started off life in the studio as an improvised exploration of part of Jarrett’s concert (Harrell uses only the first 26-minute movement, or Part 1, of the album) but it has since become, like the recording, fixed. One advantage Harrell and his dancers have is that any live performance inevitably embodies some element of improvisation within the choreographer’s more or less defined lines. 

The very opening of Köln Concert begins with Harrell standing in bare feet on the edge of the stage watching the audience take their seats; he is wearing a white shirt and black pants but he has a dress tied casually behind his neck and hanging down his front like an apron. If we have never seen Mr. Harrell before, we may be wondering if this person should be there at all, but he remains in place, enjoying watching as well as being watched. In conversation with Philip Bither of the Walker Arts Centre, Harrell says he does this a lot in his performances, that he enjoys communing with the audience in this way ‘and I don’t need to be hidden before the show.’ 

The stage (conceived by Harrell) under Sylvain Rausa’s even lighting is stark, with seven low, grey benches spread out in a parallel pattern on the front half of the stage and a speaker mounted on a stand behind, signifying recorded music. But when the music begins, it’s not Jarrett’s Köln Concert but Joni Mitchell singing My Old Man from her album Blue. Harrell begins to float his arms loosely to a gentle lilt of his feet that has the feel of a private, trance-like improvisation in the public arena. Perhaps Joni is the dress and Jarrett is the black pants and white shirt. Another song follows from the same album; the piano of The Last Time I Saw Richard is reminiscent of passages in Jarrett’s Köln Concert, and while it’s playing Ondrej Vidlar wanders on stage to sit on a bench and begin his own variation of Harrell’s floating arms. Rob Fordeyn, Songhay Toldon, New Kyd, Thibault Lac and Maria Ferreira Silva each enter in turn to sit on their respective benches with variations on the floating, percolating arms as Joni sings It’s Comin’ on Christmas and Both Sides Now. It’s a long prologue that blends the idiosyncrasy of the dancers in their colourful, quirky costumes (by Harrell) with the homogeneity of the gestural choreographic language. By the end of Both Sides Now all the dancers have left except the tall, imposing figure of Lac, who taxies upstage to prepare for takeoff. 

The Köln Concert was conceived at a time Harrell was studying Butoh, and in the same way Jarrett plays those first distinctive notes of his concert (inspired apparently by the Köln Opera House intermission bell), Harrell sets the tone of his choreography with a Butoh-inflected fashion runway as Lac minces unsteadily downstage looking steadily at the audience. The other dancers follow in a suite of languorously intoxicated variations while re-arranging and swapping items of clothing on each appearance; as much is happening in the wings as on the stage. What comes across is an improvisation on individuality with its accumulation of dishevelled, raunchy imagery. The sometimes over-eagerness of the dancers to embody it  can lead to affectation, but when New Kyd launches into her variation the smooth exhilaration of her movement approaches the heights of Jarrett’s inspired playing. In the closing of Part 1, Jarrett plays a rousing section over an ostinato bass that Harrell interprets as a round dance where each of the dancers, when they arrive at the front, improvises a short solo before joining the circle again. It’s a heady climax that resolves into a beautifully modulated conclusion where Jarrett and the dancers finish their ‘unfolding act of creation’. 

Gary Clarke and Akademi, The Troth at Queen Elizabeth Hall

Gary Clarke and Akademi, The Troth, Queen Elizabeth Hall, May 5

Subhash Viman Gorania and Vidya Patel in The Troth (photo: Simon Richardson)

The original review was published online in pulseconnects and appears here by kind permission of its editor, Sanjeevini Dutta. 

Gary Clarke’s choreographic adaptation of The Troth at Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of Alchemy is based on a love story (Usne Kaha Tha in its original Hindi) written in 1915 by Chandradhar Sharma Guleri that is set against the background of India’s involvement as part of the British Empire in the First World War.

As a youth Lehna Singh (Subhash Viman Gorania) meets Leela (Vidya Patel), like Romeo meeting Juliet, at a market festival and falls in love with her. When he bumps into her some years later, he learns she is betrothed. He answers a recruitment call to join the British Army and begins training. Eighteen years into the story, on the outbreak of the First World War, he discovers that his Captain (Songhay Toldon) is Leela’s husband and father of their son, Bodha (Dom Coffey), who is also leaving for the front. On their departure Leela takes Lehna aside and makes him promise to protect her family at all costs. Driven by his love for Leela and his sense of duty, Lehna fulfills his promise at the cost of his own life.

There is in the relationship between Lehna and Leela a metaphor for the ties between India and the British Raj, whether Guleri meant it or not. The British Army’s inducements to Indians like Lehna to protect the Empire were more calculatingly material — a contemporary recruitment poster offers shoes and food in return for the sacrifice of their lives — but the honourable relationship between country and beloved motherland had the same tragic consequences.

Despite its historical context, there is no horror in the re-telling of this story; dance can’t do horror very well and even the projected archival film footage of Indian soldiers on the front is quite sanitized, filmed from a safe distance behind the lines and suffused with subtle propaganda. One photograph of a pair of disintegrating legs attached to their boots in the mud is the only graphic image, a reminder of the fate of 60,000 Indian soldiers in the conflict. Shri Sriram’s percussive sound score rattles with bullets and explosions at high intensity and the dancers run at full tilt and fly to the ground in the chaos of battle but the reiteration of such physical exertion becomes a choreographic trope unless Clarke is suggesting the naivety of gymnastic preparations for modern warfare. The staged vigour of the soldiers on the battlefield is not far removed from the earlier men’s dances in the market, but how can one possibly approach on stage the conditions under which these soldiers had to exist in the trenches?

Neither did Guleri intend to write an anti-war tract; he was more concerned with the qualities of the heart. Hence, while Clarke’s treatment of The Troth can only approximate the war experiences, he shows more convincingly — because we can relate more easily with it and because dance can do it so well — the romance of Guleri’s story.

Clarke, as choreographer and director, takes the story at face value, and in Patel he has a convincing heroine for whom Gorania is quite understandably willing to sacrifice himself. But in framing the story on the troth between Lehna and Leela Clarke and producer, Akademi, risk subsuming the broader political picture into a romantic evocation of the past. This year marks the centenary of the end of the First World War, and The Troth is part of a cultural outpouring marking its remembrance. Next month, for example, Akram Khan’s full-scale solo Xenos ‘conjures the shell-shocked dream of a colonial soldier in the context of the First World War’ while English National Ballet will reprise its Lest We Forget program in September. The tendency of such works, and of the commemorative purposes underlying them, is to focus on the effects of war rather than on its causes; hence the stories of loss, love, loyalty, heroism and pity (‘The poetry is in the pity’, as Wilfred Owen wrote in a preface to his war poems). And yet in using these emotional stories as a means of memorialization, are we not in danger of forgetting the political forces that engendered them, those same political forces that continue to preside over the act of remembrance?

In Clarke’s previous work, Coal, about the 1984/85 coal miner’s strike, he contextualizes political force by juxtaposing the lives of the miners and their families with an appearance by a belligerent Mrs. Thatcher. It is this tension that holds the work together but in The Troth the use of archival film as historical context is little more than background and barely offsets the lack of narrative tension in the story. Perhaps Clarke could have found a way to use the political metaphor in the story but that would have run the risk of a post-colonial reading at odds with the commemorative intention of the work.