The phrase ‘community drummers’ strikes fear into me. When I read it in the programme notes for Survivor, Antony Gormley’s collaboration with Hofesh Shechter, premièred at the Barbican, I paused a beat. The elder cerebral artist paired with the young passionate choreographer: so what exactly is this? In the ladies afterwards I heard the disparaging phrase ‘GCSE work’.
Was it music? Was it theatre-making? Was it even dance? There is no narrative to speak of, but a series of sketches using 139 drummers, a band of string players, guitarists, a cameraman and six dancers, among others.
A figure shelters in a bathtub. Cannonballs drop from a height on to the stage. There are repetitive metaphors of man’s powerlessness: a dancer, harnessed horizontally and thrown into shadow, spins around over a projection of a bubbling waterfall. A tower block is blown up. The audience is filmed back to itself; a drummer in the stalls cries out.
I have always struggled with Gormley’s ‘man’, finding his themes clever but cold. Shechter seems to be struggling with his personal history, unashamedly opening his heart in his work. So far, the collaboration feels unfinished. It is liberating to see something of Gormley’s, the master perfectionist, in this state. For Shechter, it is less clear what the benefits are.
This primeval piece provoked powerful hallucinogenic dreams that night. Visual art and contemporary choreography have much in common in 2012, and the ability to stimulate our overstimulated senses is valuable indeed.
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