Transgressor
Solo.
Premiere: 29th April 1995, Pradillo Theatre, Madrid.
He's taking his baying dogs for a walk. He's shouting into the night.
He has eaten a lot of meat and licks himself clean.
He ties a sheet around his waist and improvises a bizarre religious ritual.
He's all alone in the dark. He pisses his pants.
Concept, choreography and dance: Anders Christiansen
Music: Brahms; P.J. Harvey; Nasa Voyager Space Sounds - Saturn; baying dogs
Sound design: Finn Sandø and Anders Christiansen
Lightning design: Lars Egegaard Sørensen
Production: (stillleben), KIT
Duration:25 minutes
Press quotes:
Entering the body's danger zones. ”When the young choreographer Anders Christiansen dances in The Scorpion and other tales or gives The Sleeping Beauty of ballet a piercing sting, he lives up to the true nature of a scorpion. In his new solo performance, Transgressor, at Kaleidoscope he persistently strives to force his way into the body's danger zones. A twilight space where the human body that we think we know so well suddenly reaches out with an alarming strangeness. As much heart-rending as comic, joyous as unpleasant. With one swift sting a situation can be altered radically - fatally. Any situation carries its own self-destruction. This is the very nature of corporeal choreography.
All of it is about the mortification of the flesh. About the body's questionable, but unavoidable substance and the quest for transformation. Here it seems to be the underlying theme of redemption in dance - in ballet - and the resurrection of the flesh, which Anders Christiansen tries to penetrate.
...This is choreography stripped of all audience friendly exclamation marks and explanatory notes. Its construction is coarse, containing vague links and rough clips from one situation to another. Thus, in the evening's premiere piece, Transgressor, Anders Christiansen proceeds, in a very material manner, to describe the road to redemption. After having snacked on a bowl of bloody bones, he tackles the rituals of worship, tonsured like an Asiatic monk. Encircled in grains of rice, he levitates with limping leaps and swings his shoulder bag like a censer.”
Monna Dithmer (Politiken, 26th June 1995)
Unusual dance talent alone on stage.
“Anders Christiansen works with tiny little steps and gestures and adds so much meaning and power, that each movement seems to hold the seed of a story. He has developed a formalistic language which is entirely his own. ...And his intense face and personality roars across the stage - always perfectly balanced between strength and vulnerability.”
Henrik Lyding (Jyllands-Posten, 23th June 1995)
Venues:
Kaleidoskop, Copenhagen, 21-24 June 1995 (solo programme Transgressor).
Junge Hunde / Kampnagel, Hamburg, 5-7 May 1995.
Danish Evening, arr. by KIT / Pradillo Theatre, Madrid, 29-30 April 1995.
Transgressor was produced with support from, The State Arts Foundation, Augustinus Fonden, Dansk Skuespillerforbunds Koreograflegat, Københavns Kulturfond.
Photograph: Anette Grunnet
In all images: Anders Christiansen
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