The Peeping Tom dance revolutionized the grand hall of the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya in Barcelona yesterday, Wednesday, whose exultant audience left their palms and vocal chords during the long final ovation. It had been an unusual night for dance-theater. The peculiar Belgian company had outdone itself with this Triptych, which it had already shown in part at the Grec Festival, in the midst of a pandemic, and which now culminates with a bang. Pure physical and acrobatic magic. brutal!
Choreographed for eight dancers from the Nederlands Dans Theater, this triptych is extraordinarily physically demanding. Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier, directors of the company, introduce dance to a greater extent than they are used to in their creations, allowing their imprint of ghostly, dreamlike and profoundly psychological theater to have a direct reflection on physical illusionism... How Can that man carry his partner's head under his arm, caress her and give her kisses, without the rest of her body apparently being present?
The performance immerses the audience in a two-hour mysterious journey, with stage changes behind the curtain. The characters, four women and four men, undertake a labyrinthine journey through the corridors of memory. Time stops inside him. Utopias, love, premonitions... are illusions that Peeping Tom manage to make real. Is it in that unreality that we are most true?
The trip goes through three spaces that, according to the creators, are contained in a boat. The first part is a dance of doors and air currents (The missing door) that later gives rise to one of the rooms (The lost room) until ten years later and due to natural catastrophes, the passengers survive drifting (The hidden floor) with the water penetrating the ship. Actually, the magic begins by slipping and exposing yourself to the storm while the stage remains in a perfect horizontal position.
In the midst of this bleak context, with sound effects that contribute to this sort of almighty psychomagic, a romantic passion breaks out between two of the performers while chaos rages around. The Peeping Toms have always been dark and distressing, but they manage to make sense of humor and brutality coexist in perfect harmony in a scene that, more than theatrical, points to cinematographic ways.
The novelty is the durability of the show on the billboard. The director of the TNC, Carme Portaceli, has shown her courage and has scheduled nine performances. For the first time, the couple of creators, who have established their residence in Barcelona for some time, will not occupy the theater for one or two nights, before continuing their international tour, but will allow a wider Barcelona public to have the opportunity to meet them . Their lives will change forever.
