Somnia

Together with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Jolente De Keersmaeker, forty-four dancers enter into a dialogue with the natural landscape, where factors such as sound and silence, light and dark, distance and proximity become a matter of perspective, and where both new possibilities and boundaries emerge. In search of an ecological aesthetic they leave behind the four walls of the theatre for a performance that requires few theatrical interventions and fuses seamlessly with the natural environment.

“With Somnia, we set out to create an environment within which both students and audience could experience nature in the most direct way and to do so through the most familiar, inner environment a person possesses: the body, through which we live and breathe. We believe that we can control and exploit nature, but in our physical presence we are part of nature and nature is part of us. In that experience lies the awareness that if we destroy our environment, then our end is also near and hopefully it will wake us further to the great challenges that await us in the decades to come.”
 

The woods and the night sky offer the perfect backdrop for the ‘dreams’ to which the title Somnia refers. The first of the dreams is Somnium, a novel by the seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler, in which science and science fiction merge to show that the planets revolve around the sun in an elliptic orbit. The second dream underpinning the performance is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Combining Shakespeare and Kepler, the dancers explore the intersection of text, dance and music playing with gravity while guided by fantastic stories in a space-time far beyond the borders of urban theatre.

How do we organise movement as if it were a play with gravity, or as the expression or embodiment of a thought, text or language? Anne Teresa and Jolente De Keersmaeker looked for possible answers to these questions with the last-year students of P.A.R.T.S. In doing so, Somnia writes a new story, drawing the outlines of the dream of a generation of young dancers preparing for the challenges awaiting them as the inhabitants of this earth.

These are the forgeries of jealousy;

And never since the middle summer’s spring

Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,

By paved fountain or by rushy brook,

Or in the beached margent of the sea,

To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,

But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport.

Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,

As in revenge have sucked up from the sea

Contagious fogs, which, falling in the land,

Hath every pelting river made so proud

That they have overborne their continents.

The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,

The plowman lost his sweat, and the green corn

Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard:

The fold stands empty in the drowned field,

And crows are fatted with the murrain flock; The nine-men’s-morris is filled up with mud,

And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,

For lack of tread, are undistinguishable.

The human mortals want their winter cheer;

No night is now with hymn or carol blessed; Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,

Pale in her anger, washes all the air,

That rheumatic diseases do abound.

And thorough this distemperature we see

The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts

Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,

And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown

An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds

Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,

The childing autumn, angry winter, change

Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,

By their increase, now knows not which is which.

And this same progeny of evils comes

From our debate, from our dissension;

We are their parents and original.

Titania’s monologue from A Midsummer night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
 

All Levania experiences the succession of day and night as we do, but they lack the variation that goes on all year among us. […] To produce equal nights at each of the poles, the sun is hidden half the time and shines half the time as it travels around the mountains in a circle. For Levania seems to its inhabitants to remain just as motionless among the moving stars as does our earth to us humans.

Extract from Somnium by Johannes Kepler

Translation: Normand Raymond Salardeau, Nexum Ediciones, 2015