Rooms - Rambert x Jo Strømgren
Room one, scene one; a dinner party, birthday balloons, empty bottles of wine, half-filled glasses resting in hands and on a table. The energy is electric. A lively conversation between friends fills the room, with bursts of belly laughter occasionally breaking through the chatter. The group soon dissolves into multiple pairs; dancing together, tangled in touch, desiring one another, exiting and entering rooms. With multiple spoken languages used throughout the hour-long dance-theatre film, the rooms themselves become completely telling, collaborating with movement, sound and fabric to reveal the intricacies of the relationships on display and the barriers that block harmony within a wider society.
Whilst I wish I could analyse all 36 scenes and 100 characters, it would certainly take away from the absurdness and poignance of watching the piece unfold in front of your eyes. Each scene appears more bizarre than the one before; a game of cat and mouse between police officers and a specialist plant grower, a Rubik’s cube competition, and an operatic performance complete with strings, to name but a few. From chaos to serenity, humour to seriousness, these contrasts and differences become the thread that ties the scenes together and emphasizes the disjointedness of current societal relations. For clarity, this line of thought is communicated to the viewer via a podcast scene that involves a sociologist character detailing information on the systems of a metro-insular society, one in which our quest for identity is restricted by the minimal ideas echoed throughout a self-contained society, all whilst the host hops in and out of the studio far more concerned with the arrival of his lunch.
It is no surprise that themes of isolation are drawn upon as the world navigates a new normal, with social distancing only fuelling divides of culture even more. Rooms quirkily communicates how a lack of exposure, to other ways of doing and being, brings about a lack of understanding for one another at a fundamentally human level. It is at this point in the work, maybe two thirds in, that a shift occurs. Characters are stripped of extravagance and personality, skin coloured garments are worn by all and we, as the viewer, are invited to connect with unfiltered human emotion, powerfully communicated through collective physicality. In each room, the ensemble transitions fluidly into stills; snapshots of reaching and gripping, hands and eyes searching for something beyond the boundaries of the room. Dissolving from the grasp of the group, in one room a body falls, in another a baby is found, in all three rooms chaos ensues. Intensity hits as bodies move animalistically, prowling low and scaling the seams of the room. Layered voices fill the air as the camera moves across, leading us hastily and unexpectedly into a brick wall. We are struck with themes of isolation once again, pulled from the busyness we had just experienced and stopped in our tracks; alone.
Strømgren’s production is forceful, delivering powerful and often hard hitting images throughout. Through impeccable timing, whether that is the change of a note in the score or the opening of a window, the emotive essence of the work provokes us to feel, and to feel deeply. In each dark moment you are reminded, if only momentarily, that there is hope and, through every eccentric character, whom we do meet again before the film closes, you discover a strange relatability that they possess. Rooms offers an obscure glimpse into the inner-workings of, what some might call, normality. It challenges us to recognise our own limitations and calls upon us to expose ourselves to our contradictories; the world beyond our room.
Rooms is a dance-theatre-film performed live and is a collaboration between Rambert, a contemporary dance company and choreographer, director and playwright Jo Strømgren. For more information on the work and creatives involved, click the button below.
Image from the Rambert website.