LE PRINTEMPS

“Springtime” by Mark Tompkins
At the Rencontres chorégraphiques, Mark Tompkins premieres Springtime a homage to women

By Thomas Hahn
http://dansercanalhistorique.fr/?q=content/le-printemps-de-mark-tompkins

The deluge of colors does not stop for an instant. In Springtime, the three dancers’ hijabs and niqabs irradiate the space and burn the retinas, like the sun at its zenith. It is rare, and growing rarer, for costumes to have a starring role in dance. Here, they create an unprecedented visual and physical potential. This slow accumulation, one stitch at a time, is reminiscent of Alain Platel’s Tauberbach, where the entire stage was littered with clothing. But here it has the opposite effect. In Platel’s piece, the dancers were concealed, while in Tompkins’ the three women are revealed from every angle.

Costume and set designer Jean Louis Badet maintains the bodies of the three dancers in a state of constant transformation: they go from misshapen monsters to nudity at its most vulnerable. And what completes the painting (there is a good dose of Klimt in these dazzling mosaics) is the fact that this whimsical nudity results from the most dizzying striptease of all time: performed by a whirling dervish. One after another, she removes each of five cloth rosettes encircling her.

It recalls artist-designer Majida Khattari’s runway shows, which offered a range of subversive variants on the Islamic headscarf. But even she did not plan on putting the “Arab Spring” on a burning carpet. More in the vein of Nijinsky, spring is also a time for sacrificing young women. Tompkins fosters this ambivalence, going so far as to show the dancers in positions suggesting stoning or sacrifice. But at times they also recall the witches from Macbeth, or modern women aspiring to a form of emancipation through the body. All of that in a single image.

With their bizarre jumps and their deliberate losses of balance, our female athlete-warriors develop a gluttonous appetite for combinations of neon swimwear, floral-print leggings, and other almost traditional motifs. They can pounce on the slightest sock like drug addicts starved for heroism. Above all, Springtime speaks of the extent to which all myths intersect and have common roots, from the Redskins to the Incas, by way of the desert and of course the Olympic stadiums in our times.

Springtime is the blossoming of otherness in all its forms, even in our midst. This springtime full of promise is embodied by the voice of composer and singer Kamylia Jubran, who is a symbol of the political struggle for all freedoms. Here she accompanies the three (un)veiled warriors like a benevolent spirit, interpreting lyrics as perfumed as those of the Moroccan poet Hassan Najmi: “Your radiant face blossoms each night /…/And I have forgotten how to walk /…/ Jealous of your lightness / This bench has become too narrow for us both / Let me then /…/ Drink your sap and stay thirsty…”

Though we might have expected Tompkins himself to sing or make us laugh as he has in the past, we still find the subtle dialogue between outward appearance and hidden layers we associate with him. We also recognize his political engagement and the questions he poses on stage without shouting, but by creating images that speak to all those who would like to say, in the words of the Iraqi writer Fadhil Al Azzawi: “May light be upon the world! / I am waiting for the universe to begin again.”

Rarely has speech found such relevancy in a dance piece. Here is an example of what we hear, in French, from the pen and mouth of Anna Gaïotti, one of the three protagonists: “Where is the silence? Where is that whore? / Tell her to leave me alone / To make my thoughts wither / To cast me off / To lose me / May laziness froth / May phlegm cough / The virus / that my body endures / The wreckage of joy / And the joy of embracing the clammy earth / I want to fuck that whore / and fall asleep / I want to fuck that whore / And fall sleep... The whole thing shouted by a sort of anti-swan, just like there are antiheros among men, perched high upon her stilt-like heels.

Springtime choreographed by Mark Tompkins at La Parole Errante in Montreuil
22 May, 2015 by Denis Sanglard
http://unfauteuilpourlorchestre.com/le-printemps-choregraphie-de-mark-to...

They are female warriors, dressed in jarringly colorful garb or men’s soccer uniforms which they sarcastically reinvent and make their own, perched at times on platform shoes that twist their ankles. These Middle Eastern women-warriors emancipate themselves from the dictates of male oppression, which imprison them beneath the black veils known as the burka. This appears in a zany scene where two black ghosts dance, do karate moves, and then disappear. They are veiled, yes, but in kitschy multicolored fabric which they play with and emancipate themselves from. The veils come off during a Sufi whirling ritual turned Dance of the Seven Veils. Except here, Salomé spins like a dervish, casting off her floral corollas to reveal her body in its nudity, so intoxicated by freedom she falls down dancing. A magnificent and astonishing scene that might be used to sum up this new work by Mark Tompkins, which is above all about unveiling. These women get naked literally as well as figuratively. It is a powerful gesture of self-appropriation in the absence of moral, social, religious and sexual constraints. And all these shimmering, vibrantly flashy colors they dress in—that they pile onto their bodies until they become formless—are the banners of a deliberate and fragile freedom that contrasts with the dark uniform of the niqab, a symbol of their alienation. All of this is strangely reminiscent of the work of photographer Shadi Ghadirian or artist Sara Rabhar, both Iranian. It is a political, feminist piece marked with gravity but, as always with Mark Tompkins, also poetic, offbeat and funny. He latches onto clichés about the Arab world, using them for his own purposes, and confronting them with naked reality. Whether it is a pilgrimage to Mecca or the sensual vision of a harem, color splatters and overwhelms everything like the harbinger of change, skewering things by reclaiming and transforming them. It is a twisted, and very clever. Even bodies, soon subjected to a “transformism” all their own, are not exempt. With the exception of a striptease and an attempt at walking on dizzyingly high platform shoes, the body is masculinized by the appropriation of male symbols like tracksuits and soccer uniforms, which hide and model them at the same time, giving them a new gender, a symbol of their resistance and the equality they demand.

BALLROOM #6 June / July / August 2015
By Gérard Mayen
SPRING Mark Tompkins
Veil and Jubilation

There is a splendid solo in Springtime, Mark Tompkins’ latest piece: a dancer dressed in giant flounces begins to spin. The fabric floats up. We quickly glimpse the nudity underneath. Releasing one flounce after another, the dancer slowly undresses. She continues her dervish-like gyration and the body’s roundness is distributed around the spinning top’s vertical axis to splendid effect.

This way of getting undressed is so technically unusual that we get attached to it as though to a construction. Nudity emerges like another costume. Tompkins’ art lies in this type of reversal: though Springtime is intensely colorful and sensitive, its reading liberates signifiers from stifling conventions, from the formatting established by dominant representations.

When we hear “Spring” we sometimes think “Arab.”When we hear “Arab woman” we almost necessarily think “veiled.” There are indeed niqabs in this piece, but only long enough for a physical gag. Everything else is about the joy of reclaiming womanhood, a joy often brandished bare-chested in a string of appearances and enigmatic situations. It is the freedom to look that must be unfettered. And not the perpetuation of the media’s bad habits.

We meet Kamilya Jubran, a highly contemporary Palestinian musician. We pick up the fertile sounds of Arabic poetry. We watch uncertain dances of uneven and staggering steps, the ruckus of three rebellious female bodies who are also circus and street performers. We calmly glide through the dynamic disorders of improbable harems.

Let us linger, for a change, on the language of the costumes themselves: the eccentric wardrobe of sports’ champions, Arab silhouettes, and urban creatures. We don’t know if their veilsbelong to genies, fairytale babushkas, fortune-telling bohemians, barhopping Pussy Riot members, North African mothers, or masked combatants on the frontlines of time’s harsh manifestations.

Guess What You Are
Mark Tompkins
At the rencontres chorégraphiques de Seine-Saint-Denis, American choreographer Mark Tompkins proposes a colorful vision of the (Arab?) Spring.

Movement, 5 June 2015, by Aïnhoa Jean-Calmettes,
http://mouvement.net/critiques/critiques/deviens-ce-que-tu-es 

Driven into a corner by the performance just before it, the audience went into Spring in critical overdrive. There was a touch of bad faith, an eagerness to find fault at every opportunity. So, what seemed like overly explicit symbolism at first but turned out not to be, rubbed some the wrong way.

First there was the marvelous set of an Arab courtyard (in a harem?), then a miniature Kaaba, then the bodies of women in niqabs swathed in their bewitching veils—while the figure of another woman, no less a prisoner of her image, stood teetering in platform shoes.

Except that Springtime is one of those pieces capable of chipping away at bad faith. All of the most dreaded clichés were swept away in one fell swoop, and the identities we feared would be too indexed become as shaky as Anna Gaïotti’s platform shoes. With a few ninja moves, the women in their niqabs channel all the erotic incandescence of the female body. Brought onto stage with a rope around her neck, Ananda Montange launches into a frantic dance, a sort of spinning ritual during which she releases several swatches of colorful fabric covering her body, victoriously revealed in its unselfconscious nudity. Bodies come and go, somewhere between geisha and Star Wars creature. Movements, from slithering snake to karate chop, are set to the chords of singer and oud player Kamilya Jubran.

Everything moves, unfolds and transforms in a welcoming atmosphere that owes a lot to the cheerful colors of all the fabric and transformative accessories which litter the playground of the stage. You may even find yourself letting out an involuntary laugh during this celebration of emancipation.

Mark Tompkins’ Female Spring
20 May 2015 by Delphine Goater
http://www.resmusica.com/2015/05/20/le-printemps-feminin-de-mark-tompkin...

What does femininity mean in the Arab world? At the Rencontres chorégraphiques de Seine Saint-Denis, in Springtime Mark Tompkins sets his sights on the mythical and political figure of women in the Arab world. A very colorful ode.

Downstage a woman sits playing the oud in a warm and caressing light. Singer, Palestinian musician Kamilya Jubran created the music for the show and sings poignant songs based on the verses of great Iraqi, Moroccan and Lebanese poets. Despite the oud’s slow rhythm, we find ourselves enchanted by this melodious chanting.

Three female figures gather around her. Libertarian, submissive, fierce or sensual, they are muses straight out of the Middle Eastern imagination. The most modern is the liberated woman of the Arab Spring, a democratic activist whose forehead is encircled with slogans, brandishing flags in front of us. Her veiled companions give each other a hug before launching into a funny, off-beat kung fu combat. In his shows, which are reminiscent of vaudeville or the American musical comedy tradition, Mark Tompkins always favors gags or slapstick to convey a political message. Here, his message is feminist. He piles boubous and richly brocaded fabrics on his dancers, not so that they blend into the background, but so that they assert their difference.

In the soft light of a desert evening, against sand-colored floor and walls, these bright colors take after the show: they are hybrid. From the harem to the whirling dervish, from the black cube which recalls the Kaaba in Mecca to the clothing of suicide bombers, all these images paint the kaleidoscopic portrait of an Arab woman, torn between her culture and her freedom.

Mark Tompkins’ Sacred Spring
19 May 2015 by Amelie Blaustein Niddam
http://toutelaculture.com/spectacles/danse/le-printemps-sacre-de-mark-to...

Tompkins has moved onto something else. After his trilogy Opening Night, whose praises we were already singing in 2013, and then Black’n’Blues and Showtime, he looks back at the Arab Spring using the images of a fantasy woman as a central theme.

When Kamilya Jubran, a Palestinian singer and oud player walks out onto a stage where a black cube has pride of place, we are dubious. Even more so when a colorfully dressed female warrior in a soccer jersey seizes fabric-tipped spears. Still, Springtime quickly kicks into gear and the images become like strong words. There are four women in all: Kamilya Jubran, Silvia Di Rienzo, Anna Gaïotti, and Ananda Montange. Each is different, whether in terms of body-type of physique. A musician, actress, dancer or performer. The four of them already form a plurality, the obliteration of a nebulous theory that tries to essentialize “woman” as one. Tompkins takes every possible risk: reimagining a whirling dervish ritual as a magnificent striptease, letting us experience a pilgrimage to a miniature Mecca, bringing us to the harem.

He speaks about imagination and fantasy using clothes. Hence there are two fully veiled women who face off in a battle worthy of Star Wars. There are scarves covering faces. Once he’s introduced the symbols, he lays into them, making the girls dance in the least sensual way possible, their pelvises tense, their bodies falling backwards, their knees twisted, particularly on very high platform shoes. They are very urban, with colorful leggings, caps and other athletic gear. As always in Tompkins’ work, we laugh, though here less that usual, for the show becomes very political. The veils come unveiled, and the women became activists thanks to their male clothing. Now they have weapons and they cover themselves in them. Like walking billboards for American brands, these girls could easily join a hip-hop girls band.

Spring
Mark Tompkins

31 May 2015, by Philippe Verrièle
https://verrielephilippe.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/le-printemps-mark-tomp...

The musician sets up stage left in a hodgepodge of clothes. Dark and austere, she slowly tunes her instrument while a young warrior moves flags of torn fabric. Colorful and fantastic, she has the brusque body language of a homegirl who’s afraid she’s not being taken seriously. It takes ten minutes for the singing to begin – grave, deep and somber. Two women in niqabs launch into a combat somewhere between kung fu and Star Wars and the first dancer comes back in very high heels leading a woman by a rope. Then the piece changes gears. The submissive and animalized woman launches into a whirling dervish routine which, by virtue of centrifugal force, lifts her skirts in an extraordinary strip tease. She ends up naked and liberated. Mark Tompkins thus likens clothing to a servitude which must be cast off. The astonishing finale is none other than the reversal of this liberating striptease: the three performers cover themselves with all the clothing possible until they appear formless. This remarkable piece of political incorrectness is fueled by a Middle Eastern imagination seen through the prism of women’s lib, while the music speaks gravely of war and exile.

An additional note:
A female trio accompanied by an oud player, this original piece by Mark Tompkins continues the choreographer’s characteristic exploration of gender. We may remember that Animal existed in two versions, Male (2005) and Female (2007), and already partially invented a kind of mythical Middle East. Even earlier in the choreographer’s career, we may remember Trahison Men (1985) and then Trahison Women (1986). In the current piece, the issue of womanhood paradoxically appears in the absence of men. When will we see a “male” Springtime?

Reference:
With its large parallelograms, the set, designed by the irreplaceable Jean-Louis Badet, recalls a Kasbah or Medina but also Maguy Marin’s Nocturnes (2012), a piece that was also fueled by a powerful Mediterranean imagination.

The Marseillaise – 6 October 2015
By Jean Barak

Mark Tompkins makes “Spring” in Autumn

Mark Tompkins founded his company in 1983 after a series of solos and participations in collective pieces. We have seen him dance, sing, choreograph and create unidentified dancing objects, and bizarre and fiercely self-mocking transgender happenings with an SM aesthetic, inspired by transformative cabarets and vaudeville. He is afraid of neither kitsch nor ridicule nor the grotesque. On the contrary, he uses these as arms against himself. He combines literal illustration with the transgression of codes, but always with humor.

Springtime
This piece is a departure from what we know of his work: the message is less dark, more empathetic, and has gained more gravity. The time for individual revolts against the system and exacerbated marginality are over, here he tackles the painful theme of the revolution and its aftermath.
His Springtime is resolutely Arab. First of all, there is Kamilya Jubran, a Palestinian musician with her mane of white hair, holding her precious oud in her lap. A miniature Kaaba decorated with banners in the central place, suggesting we are in Mecca, the center of the Middle Eastern version of the true faith.
Two women in niqabs show up, but they turn into ninjas before vanishing. A whirling dervish appears beneath which she escapes from, leaving her naked.
There is a fine line between gratuitous exhibition and owning one’s body without the veil. Here, the message is resolutely feminist.
Four women cross paths, Silvia Di Rienzo, a clown-like dancer; Anna Gaïotti, a performer; and Ananda Montange, a dancer and circus artist. Amidst an abundance of brand name clothes they dance awkwardly, undressing and dressing until they are formless beneath all the accumulated layers. They are accompanied with singing, the occasional note, and Kamilya Jubran’s silences:

The truth is oppressive
Can we hide the sun with a sieve?
They killed me, they killed me
I was sacrificed
I waited my turn
I came entirely undone
Yes, they killed me
War isn’t as rude as love.

Sawsan Darwaza

Between a fantasy and a parody of the Middle East, Tompkins is a gleeful blasphemer. Don’t let it get out or he might risk a fatwa, and don’t tell anyone he undresses his dancers either, or he could be barred from all the towns controlled by the Front National, and soon from all the brown, ethnically purified regions. The worst is never certain, Inch’Allah.
The piece is powerful and caustic, but being serious doesn’t mean you can’t be funny.
Let’s hope spring survives the winter, and that we stay warm through all the cold spells ahead.