Eonnagata - Sadler's Wells

For the first time in a long time, I have seen something so WOW! that I just had to write about it. To clear my head. To becalm the thoughts swirling about inside.

Eonnagata is about Charles de Beaumont, an 18th Century spy, diplomat, soldier, and transvestite. Someone neither male nor female, but somehow both and something else altogether. And it is a piece that is neither dance, nor theatre, but somehow both and something else altogether.

The work is a collaboration between dancer Sylvie Guillem, choreographer Russell Maliphant and “theatre-maker” Robert Lepage, with wonderful costumes by Alexander McQueen, but what brings all these disparate elements together is the quite breathtaking lighting design by Michael Hulls. Hulls lighting is so dynamic, atmospheric and dynamic it beggars belief.

Given the collaborators, it is tempting to fell that this is a piece which is somehow less than the sum of its parts, the dancing for example never achieves the explosiveness of Guillem and Maliphant’s previous piece “Push” , yet in a way the work achieves something else entirely, as though each of the makers have given up something to achieve something new, something unique, a new flavour, melancholic, introspective, mysterious.

Unique, yet it also reminded me of many of the best things I have seem over the years, the slow intense less-is-more hypnotic world of Butoh, the tai chi inflected movement language of Cloud Gate, the way Complicite segment the stage and define space within it, the lighting effects of Push, the theatrical magic of Philippe Genty, Charles Atlas’s superb lighting for Michael Clark. All of these and yet still something powerful, unique.

The Eastern sensations perhaps stem from the leap that Lepage made between Beaumont’s life of gender confusion and the Onnagata, male Kabuki performers who only ever play female parts. Another element of the hybrid intermingling of ideas: male / female, west / east, theatre / dance.

None of which is to say the work is perfect yet, and maybe it never will be. There were almost two many ideas, and some scenes felt a little rough around the edges. Occasionally the movements were a little awkward, uneasy even, and the sword fighting lacked conviction; there was even the odd fumble. But sometimes something which is not quite 100% can still be so much better than anything else in town.

I immediately wanted to see it again - it is in the nature of projects like these that they develop and mutate in performance. They are back in June and I’ve booked my ticket.