What’s in a definition? As far as theatre dance is concerned, quite a lot. Labelling — and often labelling for the mere sake of it — is integral to our dance culture. Take, for instance, the various A-level dance syllabuses, the curricula of most dance-studies departments and, most of all, those dance-history manuals that slavishly perpetuate simplistically formulated principles and equations. Any of those will provide you with a neat definition of postmodern dance, stating that it started in the early Sixties, when some US-based artists decided to fight convention by stripping dance of its most traditional characteristics.
What most of these sources don’t tell you, though, is that there’s also European postmodern dance. This also took to task convention and tradition, but, instead of removing any surplus, it went for an overwhelming game of rich and varied visual narratives that relied on props, sets, lighting, projections, and more. This ‘other’ postmodern dance, seldom acknowledged in Anglocentric texts and dance circles, was the equivalent of European avant-garde theatre and théâtre de recherche. Personally, I never thought it fair to relegate such an affirmed genre to a label that does not do it any justice. After all, performances such as James Thiérrée’s Tabac Rouge have little or nothing to do with the standard notion of postmodern dance.
An acclaimed performance-maker, Thiérrée is of illustrious lineage, as he is a descendant of Charlie Chaplin and the son of Victoria Chaplin. His works are constructed on a well-concocted blend of diverse performance idioms, in line with the principles that were at the core of his mother’s Cirque Bonjour and its subsequent incarnations, Cirque Imaginaire and Cirque Invisible. Tabac Rouge is no exception. Mime, dance, acrobatics, contortionism happily converge to provide 90 minutes of action, framed by and within an overabundance of visual ideas.
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