Falling Angels

In Falling Angels, the 8 female dancers are also influenced by lighting. long, bright stripes are drawn and held fast in the shadows of the darkened stage.

Steve Reich’s energetic and moving piece for percussion, with it highly associative title “Drumming Part 1”, was inspired by percussion rituals in Ghana. Jiri Kylian shapes an energetic, tumultuous action to it. Sice the rituals of the West Africans are always accompanied by dances, the choreography supplements this essential component to complete the piece of music. In Kylian’s view, the drums evoke dreams, and so he gives his imagination free rein in this piece. It wanders through the changing rythms and primitive African beat, producing an extremely exciting dance. In Falling Angels, the 8 female dancers are also influenced by lighting. long, bright stripes are drawn and held fast in the shadows of the darkened stage. Between these stripes, a series of heads appears and vanishes again, then a sequence of crossed arms. The strict beauty of the movement of arms and torsi is breathtaking. Like the music, the lighting here underscores the structure of the choreography, accentuating its construction and proceeding, a characteristic always to be found in Kylian’s work. The piece is performes with a hellish brio by 8 women in grey costumes and small white shoes, which are accented by their carefully rolled-down socks. The dancers plunge into the vortex of Steve Reich’s music, whose repeated minimalistic rhythms accelerate steadily, developing a highly emphatic power.

Source: Arthaus Musik

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