ANIMAL

With his new performance, ANIMAL, the American choreographer Mark Tompkins, who works in France, will be appearing at the Kaaitheater for the second time. While his previous piece, Song and Dance, was a sort of ironic self-portrait and a discussion of the tradition of dance and entertainment, in ANIMAL he addresses the universal theme of the struggle between Good and Evil.

The location of ANIMAL is quite literally a boxing ring in which the World Fighting Championships are being held, with the audience seated around it as in real-life matches. The dancers engage in man-to-man combat, ruthlessly. Mark Tompkins himself plays the referee. In addition to a struggle between Good and Evil, ANIMAL is also the conflict between the strict rules of the game which the referee attempts to impose, and the instinctive impulses of these human ‘wild animals’; it is also a conflict between morals and aggression. In the end we are left with neither a winner nor a loser. All that remains is the life impulse and the death impulse.

The stage setting for ANIMAL also plays a decisive role in the concept and perception of the performance: we not only have the arrangement around the boxing ring, but in the boxing ring itself there is a moving, reflecting surface which, during the course of the performance, changes the position of the fighters and the spectators with regard to each other and to their own image, which is reflected or projected in the form of a shadow. Indeed, we could almost imagine ourselves to be in Plato’s Cave.