Live Review: Compagnie Maguy Marin, Salves

Americans, and as dance presenter White Bird showed last night, apparently the French, have a preoccupation with the apocalypse. Even if you're not the in the 41 percent of Americans who believe in an imminent rapture, media and pop culture constantly bombard us with the idea of a collapsing society (h/t David Wong). From The Walking Dead to Elysium to the frenzy over the government shutdown and the debt ceiling, we seem to really like the idea that the world is ending.


Compagnie Maguy Marin seems to like the idea, too, as it made clear in its show at the Newmark last night. The performance of Salves, meaning salvos (meaning “a simultaneous discharge of artillery or other guns in a battle”) is a series of quick, ominous tableaus depicting things falling apart. Expectedly, all of the dystopian messages—about religion, war, nonconformism—don’t say anything specific as a whole, but the way they’re presented is haunting and thought-provoking.

IMAGE: Didier Grappe

Each tableau is separated by a few seconds of pitch black and crackling white noise from one of four large vintage tape recorders placed around the stage. Someone drops a miniature Statue of Liberty. A king is assassinated. A painting—Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People—falls off a wall. All the while, people bustle about with a sense of urgency, like something bad is about to happen. The performance has a rhythm, with stage action occurring for about the same duration as the preceding blackness, starting with the ending click of the tape recorder. Five seconds of staticky blackness, five seconds of action—for an hour.

This proved too much for some people in the audience, especially as the audio recording started sounding more like a shrieking horror movie score than simple white noise. It’s no secret that last time Maguy Marin played Portland in 2002, much of the audience walked out because of the annoying soundscape. There was no mass exodus for this show, but one guy—in fact, the man sitting next to me, who covered his ears much of the time—wasted no time leaping out of his seat at final bows, and as applause began, he practically shrieked an enthusiastic “BOO!”

IMAGE: Jean-Pierre Maurin

True, for people expecting a nice White Bird dance show, this was probably a disappointment. Maguy Marin calls this “dance theater,” but even that is probably a stretch, as the only dance movements are a few lifts. But the coordination of the performers’ movements from scene to scene must take extraordinary precision, especially considering all the costume changes.

The “surprise ending,” which White Bird co-founders Walter Jaffe and Paul King keep telling audiences not to spoil, isn’t that much of a surprise, in that it’s an extended final tableau that’s no more unexpected than the preceding shorter ones. However, it is the most vivid and action-packed, appropriate for a finale. It’s a culmination, for sure, but a culmination of what? The pieces of Salves never really come together in a comprehensive way, but the end of the world probably won’t make sense, either.

SEE IT: Salves is at the Newmark Theatre, 1111 SW Broadway, 245-1600. 7:30 pm Friday-Saturday, Oct. 11-12. $26-$67. Tickets here.

WWeek 2015

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