When you walk into the theatre to watch Rule of Three, you’re given a pair of earplugs. This is because the piece, developed by Belgian choreographer Jan Martens in collaboration with US drummer and producer NAH, gets quite loud. I mean ears-ringing-from-standing-next-to-the-speaker loud. It’s also bright. I mean epileptic-seizure-inducing-strobes-coming-through-your-eyelids bright.
The aim is, in part, to reproduce the atmosphere and experience of a club. There is the sensory overload, the heady excitement, the adrenalin and euphoria. And there is the low that follows (or even accompanies) the high: a profound sense of alienation, a kind of existential emptiness or false escapism, a feeling of loneliness despite being in a crowd.
Martens also seeks to replicate the “noise” of everyday life — the fragmentary but endless stream of a Facebook feed, the disconnection that comes from living in a hyper-connected world, the constant distraction we are offered and our consequent restlessness. We are uncomfortable, you could say, with silence.
What rut am I stuck in? Do the endless iterations of the daily grind serve any purpose? What is the point of it all?
For this reason, the earplugs serve an additional purpose: by dulling our aural input, closing us off slightly from the world around us, they encourage a kind of introspection even as we keep our gaze on the dancers. This forces us to ask, when we observe the trio (Steven Michel, Courtney Robertson and Daniel Mussett) perform a series of repetitive and apparently compulsive movements, not “Why are they like this?” but “Are we like this?”
What rut am I stuck in? Do the endless iterations of the daily grind serve any purpose? What is the point of it all? These are not easy questions to face, and most people avoid them however they can.
Earplugs are also useful when you’re sitting in a theatre auditorium near someone who is quite obviously uncomfortable in their own skin — the chatty-extrovert type who fills the pre-show air with silly quips and proceeds to offer banal commentary of events onstage. I had one of these delightful creatures behind me for the one-off performance of Rule of Three at the Market Theatre (it has since moved to Oudtshoorn for the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees this weekend). Having him drowned out by NAH’s drum beats and putting in my earplugs was a great pleasure.
But something strange was in the air on that occasion. It may have been the alcohol that fuels most Saturday nights; it may have been a disjunction between the frivolity of the crowd that had gathered for the show and the seriousness of purpose of the performers. Whatever it was, it left sections of the audience impatient with Martens’ production concept and its execution.
On the one hand, the “threes” are quite straightforward: for example, Martens speaks of light/music/movement, a combination that is easy to consume insofar as it creates an impressive spectacle. On the other hand, this response is only one corner of another of Martens’ triangles: aesthetics/emotion/reflection. The audience that evening wasn’t willing to do the work of sitting with uncomfortable emotions and reflecting on the experience.
This became evident when, after the barrage of sound, things became quiet. The dancers stripped their clothes off, broke off from the “characters” they had enacted, and sat naked before us on stage. They were asking us to join them in their vulnerability, in a moment of stillness that (if faced bravely and sincerely) might provide some form of redemption.
Instead they got titters, cat calls and wolf whistles. The culmination of the piece, in which the three dancers seek respite in the mutual reassurance of intimacy and touch — their nudity a declaration of authenticity, after demonstrating to us how so much of our daily interaction with others is a self-involved performance — was lost.
As the dancers, clothed again, faced the audience at the end of the show, it felt as if a contract had been broken. The audience was divided between those who stood on their feet to applaud and those who giggled and walked out. Some people, Rule of Three demonstrates, prefer noise to silence.
The Flemish Dance Season continues at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg and the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town in May and June.
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