Two new pieces by Peeping Tom

La Ruta  © Rahi Rezvani, NDT 1

Gabriela Carrizo and Frank Chartier, founders of the Peeping Tom dance company, have been working separately again for the past two seasons, following Kind in 2019, which they created together long after A louer in 2011. In 2022, Carrizo created her second choreography, La Ruta, with NDT 1 dancers. In 2023 Chartier created a piece for the duo's own company, S 62° 58', W 60° 39'. La Ruta was on NDT 1's programme in 2022-23 and the current 2023-24 season, while S 62° 58', W 60° 39' continues its world tour.

For those familiar with the work of Peeping Tom, neither Carrizo's La Ruta nor Chartier's S 62° 58', W 60° 39' begins surprisingly or unexpectedly. In La Ruta, which lasts about 30 minutes, Carrizo has transferred the eerie and creepy atmosphere she created indoors (in the cabin of a cruise ship) in The Missing Door, which she had previously worked on with NDT 1, to outdoors, on and around a road, an asphalt road, as the title of the piece suggests. It is well known that cinema, especially David Lynch's films, has had a great influence on Peeping Tom's work; in La Ruta this influence is very evident and it is impossible not to be reminded of Lost Highway while watching the piece. La Ruta also reminded me of the films of Kurosawa and Almodovar.

La Ruta © Rahi Rezvani, NDT 1

La Ruta © Rahi Rezvani, NDT 1

When the curtain opens, we see a deserted road and an isolated bus stop on a dark, foggy night. The light from the bus stop and the headlights of passing cars illuminate the surroundings. The atmosphere is sombre. Later in the piece, a worker in orange overalls and a protective helmet is constantly tinkering with a roadside electrical box, a distraught young woman gets out of an approaching car whose headlights we only see, argues with an invisible passenger in the light of the headlights and attacks him with her bag, unusual protagonists wander around, one attacks the others with a very large rock, they all transplant a deer heart into one of them, a man runs with a dead goose in his arms.

It is impossible to make sense of all these fragmentary situations, but this is unnecessary when one reads Carrizo's quotation from Teodor Currentzis, the most extraordinary conductor of recent years, in the programme: "It’s very difficult to organise a dream, because  wh en you organise it, you wake up. When you take control of a dream, you understand that you are sleeping. This is why, to dream you need to be unprotected." With the clue provided by this quote, it is clear that emotions rather than meanings are at the forefront of the reception of La Ruta. However, the atmosphere of the piece is closer to nightmares than the dreams Currentzis refers to; it is threatening and absurd, but also humorous.

La Ruta is characterised by the visual and aural atmosphere that Carrizo has succeeded in creating on stage, which is unique in the world of dance; choreographically, it is a design that emphasises the elastic use of all the limbs of the body, even in unusual ways. As Peeping Tom has already created three pieces with the NDT 1 (the other two were directed by Frank Chartier), Carrizo's collaboration with dancers familiar with her style has resulted in an impressive piece. 

La Ruta had its world premiere in May 2022 as part of NDT 1's Dreams 360 programme, and in the 2023-24 season it was included in the From Here Now Far programme, this time with Simon McBurney & Crystal Pite's Figures in Extinction [2.0] and Sharon Eyal & Gai Behar's Jackie. It won Best New Dance Production at the prestigious Olivier Awards on 15 April 2024.

S 62° 58', W 60° 39' © Olympe Tits, Peeping Tom

As I have already written, Frank Chartier's S 62° 58', W 60° 39' begins also in a way that will come as no surprise to those familiar with Peeping Tom's other pieces. For example, as in 32 rue vandenbranden, the scene is dominated by a snowy, cold atmosphere, conceived and executed in a hyper-realistic manner. In 32 rue vandenbranden there were two caravans, seemingly abandoned on a plain towards the mountain peaks; here there is a lonely sailboat, seen from the rear, trapped in an ice-covered sea.

As the show begins, a boy sitting on the back of the boat suddenly slips into the ice-covered water, someone calls for help on the radio, the boat loses power, the crew tries to start the engine, the sound of the engine starting turns into Vivaldi's music, the boat is rocked by the storm and the crew tries to cope with the strong wind with acrobatic movements in which they use their bodies flexibly. A little later, a man in a diving suit emerges from the ice with a child in his arms, and says to him: "Son, I miss you and I love you very much, I couldn't be with you for your first steps, for your first day at school, for all your birthdays, I couldn't kiss you, I couldn't tell you I love you, I'm sorry", while at the same time he hears the sound of a crying baby on the radio he is holding to his ear.

The unusual and dark atmosphere, the puppet-like figures, the use of the body's elasticity, the acrobatic movements designed to ignore gravity; all this is familiar to Peeping Tom fans, until the sharp turn the show takes just 10 minutes into its run. In this scene, Romeu Runa, who plays the father mourning his son, immediately turns to the director, who he assumes is at the back of the theatre, and says accusingly: "This is not me, this is you! Use your imagination, not your life, not the facts!" And so, we are out of the piece, or, as it turns out, out of the flow of the rehearsal of a piece. The actor has rebelled against the director. Immediately we hear the depressed voice of the director responding to the actor and apologising. In the later scenes of the piece we do not see the director at all, we only hear his voice over the loudspeaker.

After the actor's rebellion, in which he descends from the stage into the auditorium and then leaves the theatre, other actors on the stage, in particular Marie Gyselbrecht, who has been an indispensable protagonist of the company since its early years, also express their rebellion against the director. Gyselbrecht, for example, complains about the traumatic roles and environments that the director has forced her to play over the years. Another performer immediately claims the role of Runa, while another complains that even the set is unrealistic and completely plastic at a time when ecological sensitivity should be at the forefront. The actors complain that Chartier's female characters are two-dimensional, that he does not care about the ecological footprint of the community, that he focuses on the toxic aspects of male-female relationships, and that he repeats himself in each piece. Although the performance resumed with the director's persuasion, it was soon interrupted by another complaint. Returning to the stage after a while, Runa's huge solo performance, in which all the thoughts and emotions in his brain and all the lines and muscles in his body are mixed together and which lasts for the last 20 minutes of the piece, is admirable.

S 62° 58', W 60° 39' © Olympe Tits, Peeping Tom

S 62° 58', W 60° 39' © Olympe Tits, Peeping Tom

In S 62° 58', W 60° 39', we see a troupe complaining to their director after an actor's rebellion leads to an exit from the 'play'; we witness the tense relationship between a director trying to deal with his traumas through theatre and his actors in existential crisis. We never see the director, but we hear his voice through the loudspeaker, like the image of the 'powerful director who communicates with a microphone from behind his desk in the auditorium during rehearsals'; his voice fills the theatre like a 'god', but there is a sense of a bowed neck, a broken sceptre, a psychological fallenness in his tone, accents and character. From time to time we return to the 'play', but not for long, for the actors' rebellion against the director is deep. If you are at all familiar with Peeping Tom, its pieces, its founders and its performers, you will be aware of the third layer, which makes the piece even more entertaining, because everyone in the piece addresses each other and the director by their real names, and the thoughts of the actors in their confessions and rebellions against the director refer specifically to and originate from the pieces of Peeping Tom. Chartier pretends to aim the arrows at himself; one of the protagonists mocks him twice, calling him "the Castelluci of Maalbeek" (Maalbeek is the Brussels district where Peeping Tom's studio is located). In this way, Chartier pokes fun at many of the choices of contemporary staging techniques, the habits of the rehearsal process, the relationship between performer and director, and the search for realism and artificiality in acting, - in fact, everything about the practice of the performing arts today.

Peeping Tom's previous pieces could be defined as dance theatre if one had to put a label on them; however in this latest piece there is very little dance, but the general situation created on stage and the monologues and dialogues that feed it are cleverly constructed and work like clockwork performed with masterful timing. What we have here is a gorgeous 110-minute example of meta-theatre, hilariously funny, sometimes slowing down, sometimes speeding up, but always keeping the pulse of the audience correctly.

With the image of the boat stuck in the ice, unable to move forward during its journey, Chartier shows us that a director in the process of creation, but above all the art of theatre, which -as one of the performers expressed during the performance- "has been defeated by TikTok, Instagram and YouTube today", is in crisis and the way forward is not clear. I don't know about other companies, but with this marvellously witty piece, Peeping Tom's path is clear!

[The original version in Turkish was published in art.unlimited]