You Made me a Monster

William Forsythe again. We are invited on stage at Sadler's Wells, in groups, round tables on which card models of skeletons are joined up in non-sense, grotesque ways, and asked to contribute to the distortion of that symbol of death. The story of the slow death from cancer of Forsythe's wife, by all accounts a remarkable dancer, is projected on the screen. Three dancers appear, and dance out the agony, taking visual cues from the grotesque distortions we have assisted in creating. Their cries are distorted, amplified, protracted electronically.

Obviously a difficult piece but I'm uneasy about the three energetic, young, healthy bodies of the dancers mimicking the agonies of a body racked by cancer. It seemed excessive: it seemed like elaborating and mimicking, hardly re-enacting. Of the three the woman was the most effective, but the piece relates to a woman. I could only think that only one person could really dance this piece. Perhaps one woman since it is about a woman. Or perhaps Forsythe himself, whose experience it is, with just the one, the original, card skeleton that he says set the piece in motion. But it is a scary, challenging piece of theatre.

How can art deal with grief, loss, chaos? The piece seemed too close to trying to depict appearances, suffering, grief, chaos, when what we need, and expect, is resolution, a way of relating to suffering, grief, chaos. But perhaps that grief is irresolute. Perhaps the howling and contortions are cathartic, an exorcism.

A parallel suggested itself with Claire Denis's film L'Intrus, based on the brief study by French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy of his experience of a heart transplant, and subsequent cancer caused by anti-rejection drugs, two 'intruders' into his body, that suggested to him a whole study of the intruder, the 'other', the foreign, in society. L'Intrus is extremely beautiful, thoughtful, and quite mysterious too. But then it isn't about grief, bereavement, about the anger of loss: it is about intrusion. & Jean-Luc Nancy is still alive.