I Don’t Believe in Outer Space William Forsythe‘s latest work premiered at Sadler’s Wells, London last week. The dance is an intensely personal work looking at the very nature of fragile existence through Forsythe’s eyes. The dance is both comic and tragic, the stage is strewn with balls of black tape suggestive of meteorites, but it is not about astronomy. Forsythe says ‘the space it is talking about is the one where you look back on your life and you think, where the hell was it? You finally begin to focus on the fragility of the whole experience’.
The show opens with a fabulous dark and physical monologue from Dana Caspersen, she plays two neighbours meeting for the first time. One scary and predatory, the other polite, sweet and desperately looking for a way to get rid of him, her body completely changing in shape character and movement as she alternates between the two. (above left)
Spoken text as well as music by composer Thom Willems, using lines from Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive and others both as a melody and lines slipped in as spoken word.
‘As if by chance things are falling, as if by chance moving’
‘I can feel it’ ‘I put a spell on you. I love you and I don’t care’
‘you’d think I’d crumble, you’d think I’d die’
‘No more… no more stopping, no more going. No more sun. No more taking a walk in the dark’