Trọng tâm

If you used an excitement meter on Meg Stuart and Philipp Gehmacher’s conceptual dance work “Maybe Forever”, you could be surprised to find that the graph you had planned on posting to your website, like the tweet volume meters favoured by many sports websites, may look quite flat. But then this is a contemporary performance in which, unlike sports events, what happens during and at the end of the show may be not as important as its after-effect on the audience.

The stage of the Graha Bhakti Budaya auditorium is framed by semi-circular curtaining and is almost bare except for a low platform stage right, two microphones on stands, an electric guitar and a loudspeaker stage left, in addition to, upstage with a strong presence, a sepia photograph with two dandelions in focus against a background blur of trees. Stuart and Gehmacher begin with a slow duet amidst a brief series of low flashing lights. And that may be when the excitement graph rises to its highest. Stuart's subsequent monologue – sweet sentences abruptly changed by the end clause “I take that back” – fills in the back-story of a break-up.

Smooth mix of performing arts disciplines

What’s remarkable throughout the 80-minute performance are Stuart and Gehmacher’s blending of  and frequent shifts to and from stage acting and dance, as well as from everyday to choreographed movement – a combination that never runs the risk of being labelled pedestrian. One repeated gesture is what Stuart calls “long arms”, in which the performers extend their arms and hands as high as they can to wave at each other. It’s like a special code that means something dear to the couple when they’re together, but becomes painful after the split.

The same smooth mix of performing arts disciplines – in addition to life and art itself – is also evident in Niko Hafkenscheid’s live guitar play and vocals, and Vincent Malstaf’s music and sound design. The music and lyrics are as melancholic as the performance, and since Hafkenscheid directly addresses us, they are sung for both performers and audience. After calling our attention to the performance at the start, Jan Maertens’s lighting design simply, and subtly, gives the limelight to the performers. His masterful touch shows at the final moment when the lighting delicately changes the photograph’s colour tone.

The monotonous can be engaging

Heraclitus had it right two and a half millennia ago: change is the only constant. It just seems to me that when it comes to contemporary relationships, we change much faster than our patience.

What’s much more important than – I admit it – my failed romances is the refreshing experience of watching a work by veteran artists who have left enough space for us to fully immerse ourselves in the work, adding our interpretation and partaking in individual journeys. After all, our experiences in failed romantic relationships vary. Performed at the 10th Indonesian Dance Festival, this piece demonstrates that the monotonous can be engaging, the mournful invigorating, and the mundane extraordinary. Such is life, and so is love.

One may argue that people go to performing arts events to experience what they cannot in real life – or, enough of early 20th century realism, please. In dance, they expect to experience exceptional movement skills, for example. What they seem to forget is that sometimes we let life pass by without really thinking about it. Reconfirming that art is rooted in life, Maybe Forever allows us to do otherwise and hopefully, as we move on, not repeat a mistake, though knowing in the back of our minds that we probably will.

Maybe Forever is on a Southeast Asian and Australian tour, organized by the Goethe Institut, despite the fact that none of the artists are German (though Stuart is Berlin-based). Unfortunately, the only part of our country it crossed was the Gulf of Thailand last week on the group's flight from Ho Chi Minh City to Singapore. Maybe Forever would have been a sizeable dance top-up for Bangkok audiences after the visit of Xavier LeRoy last November.


Pawit Mahasarinand
is a lecturer at Chulalongkorn University’s Dramatic Arts Department, and a dance and theatre critic for “The Nation” newspaper.