by Leigh Witchel
“Young Men” (Acts I & II) pulled off more than one balancing act. Produced by BalletBoyz, it is a hybrid that managed to walk a thin line between live dance and film, mood and narrative, as well as specifics and universal truths.
Commissioned to commemorate the centennial of World War I, the piece was originally created as a stage show in 2015. It was adapted by Artistic Directors William Trevitt and Michael Nunn into a film the following year. This production is an amalgamation of the two. Film and dance are often discrete: show the film, dance, show more film, dance some more. In this depiction of the experiences of war, the two mediums bled into one another.
The work opened with low dull rumblings of explosions. They sounded benign, like fireworks in the distance. The entire evening was punctuated with these like white noise.
The onstage scene was simply depicted, a low, raised platform, a screen behind and a desolate stage strewn with autumn leaves. The film led us into a small, smoky parish church. Two women, their backs to us, sat in the front pew. They lit candles and prayed, small photographs tucked into their missals. The older of the two (played both onstage and onscreen by Royal Ballet Principal Character Artist Elizabeth McGorian) walked from the wings onto the stage, looking out towards us to scan the horizon.
Six men appeared suddenly from behind the platform as if crawling out of a foxhole. In pairs, they collapsed, and were helped up by their comrades. If it was cliché, it was also effective shorthand.
On the screen behind, a sergeant, played by Matthew Rees, stood wearing a thick wool jacket. His hair was parted at the center and handlebar mustache stiffly waxed, like a shadow of the past in an albumen print. Rees remained unmoving, staring ahead in a courtyard filled with sandbags and dead leaves. To a martial drumbeat, men raced back and forth in training exercises translated seamlessly into choreography by Iván Pérez. A complex phrase of racing, tumbling, and falling to the ground evasively looked as if it might be a military exercise.
The action transferred to the stage. The sergeant bellowed at the enlisted men, “GO!” They jogged in tight high steps. This morphed into a desperate conflict, borne out of exhaustion and fear, between Rees and one man, danced by Bradley Waller, who resisted him. Rees kept screaming hoarsely even after everyone had left the stage.
The piece continued through emotionally charged episodes that married film and live dance. More than a collage, but less than a narrative, if there wasn’t a plot to follow, there still was a clear situation, and a thematic landscape.
Onscreen, in a foxhole, a young soldier tore a letter to bits, and walked up and out of the foxholes with his hands held up. Towards what, and why – desertion, suicide? Keaton Henson’s score (recorded by the BBC Concert Orchestra) of churning violins recalled Michael Nyman’s minimalism. The film lurched with explosions and suddenly the young soldier’s live counterpart was thrown onto the stage. Several of the transitions between film and live action followed that sort of multi-media jump.
Life in conflict, moments of boredom or tranquility punctuated by terror, passed. Not all of them were caused by an enemy. In a tranquil lane of green leaves and singing birds, a young woman in a nurse’s uniform turned off the road on her bicycle and changed into men’s clothing just out of sight of the camp of soldiers. She met Waller and danced passionately with him onstage as the trees on the film behind them slowly moved like Birnam Wood.
The atrocities of the war were shown in a stylized fashion. At night in an abandoned farmhouse, one man slept apart from the rest of the men shivering on the ground. The noise of planes buzzed overhead; he was panic-stricken. Another man came out, held him to calm him, danced with him and let him ride on his back, then gently guided him to where the terrified man could sit. He brought out what looked like a white hood and left him. It was a gas mask. Everyone returned wearing a hood to go through their training dance, jogging and rolling at top speed. The music cut off as the soldier was alone. He pulled the mask off, heaving desperately.
An intermission almost as long as the final part of the work felt unnecessary, and a dilution. After, a woman came to the camp with a clutch of eggs. The sergeant assaulted her; the men intervened, led by Waller. It became a full-blown fight; the sergeant threatening them with his razor. He held the woman captive in a sinkhole; Waller peeled him off her and the two men grappled, half-conflict and half-kiss. Finally the enlisted man dumped the sergeant in water, face down. Class, abuse of authority, the homoeroticism of combat – so many themes woven in the fabric of the dance as much as in the war itself. “Young Men” was content to leave them for us to tease out, and was structurally sound enough that it could do so.
The film shifted to nature – raspberry bushes and songbirds – that blissfully ignored the killing grounds. The camera panned to the church, but the action switched to the stage as Waller returned to meet the two women. He collapsed into their arms, shaking as they tried to both comfort and restrain him as the curtain fell.
“Young Men” had powerful material to work with, but it lived up to it. The saddest irony comes in commemorating the pain and futility of WWI after a century, only to find Britain is now the instigator of the tearing apart of a continent again.
copyright © 2019 by Leigh Witchel
“Young Men” (Acts I & II) – BalletBoyz
The Joyce Theater, New York, NY
January 29, 2019
Cover: “Young Men.” Photo © Sophie Harris-Taylor.
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