In 1985, in “Föld”, the concentric movement of the dance developed from the contrast between the body and the dark earth that covered the stage. In 1986, in “Typhoon”, the dancers advanced, resisting a violent flow of air coming from three enormous fans. In 1987, in “Staunch”, a percussive male choreography was blocked by a transparent glass wall that separated the audience from the performers. Krisztina de Châtel, a choreographer of Hungarian origin born in 1943, trained in Germany at the Folkwang Tanzschule in Essen and moved to Holland in the 1960s, is the spokesperson for an aesthetic research that, based on an analysis of the minimalist timbre gesture, takes shape in a dance style played on the conflict of opposing forces, deriving from the comparison between the body and the scenographic context. In her, the awareness of the rules of space of German origin, masters of thought Laban and Kurt Jooss, is in fact married with an investigation of the possibilities of movement resulting from a type of study of the theme-variations relationship that has many analogies with the minimalist musical technique of the Americans Philip Glass and Steve Reich, whose scores have frequently accompanied the titles of the Dansgroep Krisztina de Châtel, born in 1976. A key protagonist of the first generation of Dutch contemporary dance, de Châtel has cultivated fruitful collaborative relationships over the last twenty years with visual artists such as Peter Vermeulen, author of the scenography of “Typhoon”, “Staunch”, “Paletta” and “Concave”. The last two titles develop the same basic idea in different ways, that is, the opposition between two groups, male and female, one of which is forced to move in small spaces. If in “Paletta” (1992, music by Steve Reich) the dancers are caged in large transparent tubular structures, in “Concave” (1993) it is the male trio that struggles inside two steel spheres. Two dancers occupy the larger sphere, the other the smaller one. They provoke the movement of both in the stage space by moving their bodies. The women, on the contrary, dance on the outside. Yet even their choreographic variations arise in response to a starting impediment: all three have their arms blocked by their clasped hands, first behind their backs, then in front of their torsos. Sheathed in a transparent sky blue suit, covered by a darker skirt with large sheets open at the hips, the three develop to the suspended notes of “Voci Bulgare” a choreography punctuated by soft twists of the shoulders and knees whose singular qualitative timbre is determined precisely by the physical starting impediment. Impairment that is also proposed by the male trio, as soon as, freed from the spheres, they find themselves acting on the same territory as the female trio. The six dance variations that are increasingly articulated from a spatial point of view: lines that intertwine and separate, parallel and diametrically opposed figurations, managed by a geometricity of evident intent. But it is a mathematical clarity, on which the evidence of a constant impediment presses, suggesting to the audience the impossibility of perfection.
