Fantastic faun

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A lithesome dancer commands the stage as a frolicsome forest creature.

WHEN L’apres Midi D’un Faune (The Afternoon Of A Faun) was staged in 1912, famed premièr danseur Vaslav Nijinsky nearly caused a riot. The editor of France’s venerable Le Figaro newspaper started a campaign against the ballet, calling it shameless and deeming Nijinsky’s choreography “too expressive”. Thanks to the furore, the dance was only performed another few years before it was shelved.

It was revived in the 1980s by two dance notation specialists who reconstructed it from Nijinsky’s notebooks and photographs taken shortly after that first performance. Since then, the piece has been performed by the great Rudolf Nureyev and later elements of it were used by Queen’s Freddie Mercury for the band’s I Want To Break Free music video in 1984. Coincidentally, it was in that same year that Ramli Ibrahim would perform his own version of the frisky, uninhibited faun in Malaysia when he returned from studying dance abroad and established the Sutra Dance Theatre.

And recently, Ramli reprised the choreography for Sean Scantlebury of New York’s Battery Dance Company.

Animal behaviour: Sean Scantlebury as the faun in Ramli’s choreography of L’apres Midi D’un Faune.

This intriguing performance had its start in January, when the American troupe – working with the UNCHR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), Aswara (National Academy of Arts, Culture and Heritage) and Sutra – held dance workshops for refugee children. The workshops were part of the Battery Dance Company’s Dancing to Connect programme, which exposes children from low income families to the arts.

The lithesome Scantlebury, 31, had been a visual treat on stage, and a bulb must have come on in Ramli’s head after the lights had dimmed at the Aswara auditorium in Kuala Lumpur back then....

So, did Ramli’s contemporary version of L’apres Midi D’un Faune cause a scandalous sensation at the DBKL Auditorium on Sept 22? Well, suffice to say that, though one could have heard a pin drop, there were no gasps of outrage. Today’s dance audiences are obviously well acquainted with the animal kingdom and animalistic movements, thanks no doubt to National Geographic and the Discovery Channel....

As the titular faun, Scantlebury was simply amazing, and not just because he managed to effect a sort of crazy calm while kicking his heels in the air, an action that may have made a less competent dancer look silly. It was his ability to appear masculine as he placed his palms together to endearingly rest his cheek on them. It was his underlying energy that commanded every eye. It was how he made Sutra dancer Divya Nair float like a feather when they danced together.

Of course, the stage was not Scantlebury’s alone to conquer, and there were three other performances in the Into The Center production that night.

In Karma, which featured actor Sandra Sodhy as Mistress Maya with Ramli and Sutra dancer Guna as her servants in the illusory web of Time and Death, it was the constant rasp of Valerie Ross’s musical score that set a rather unfortunate mood. A member of the audience remarked that the performance felt more like a tribute to a mosquito god. And thanks to her menacing presence, Sodhy too came across as a human-sized insect. Others thought the piece too much of a mish mash of classical Indian dance, ballet and contemporary dance.

The ‘faun’ with Divya Nair who becomes the object of his affection.

But the piece did tug at the heart strings when we saw how seamlessly Ramli and Guna came together despite their age differences.

Those who have followed the growth of Sutra from the days when it was an open-air ashram in Brickfields, KL, would know that Guna joined Sutra in 1989 at the age of 26 and is now Ramli’s right-hand man. What both have gone through to withstand the test of time revealed itself in this piece – and the moment when Guna lifted Ramli in his arms and spun the senior dancer took on a metaphoric significance.

Finally, we came to Layapriya, choreographed by Jonathan Hollander, the head of the Battery Dance Company, using a musical score from Finish composer Eero Hameenniemi.

The conventional practice has always been, fast tempo equals swift movement but Hollander seems to have broken this traditional rule. The 60-year-old choreographer would not only apply this to Layapriya but to another vignette for Into The Center, when Ramli moved like a snail despite the ascending tempo of tabla beats in the background.

When the same treatment was seen in Layapriya, there was a brief moment when this writer wondered if they were playing the wrong music. When the tempo rocked, the dancers glided. When there was the anticipation that the pace would finally pick up and move on, things still remained in slow motion.

What gives, we wondered at first. Then we recalled what the MC had said at the beginning of the show: Take a deep breath and relax. And that, in turn, reminded us of the snail.

A few days earlier, we had observed a snail in Ramli’s garden. Content in a pot and oblivious to the snarling 6pm traffic just outside his gate, the snail was rippling leisurely across a leaf no bigger than a palm, leaving a shiny coat of slime in its wake.

There were two ways of regarding the snail: As a pesky critter out to destroy or as a potential idea for a National Geographic documentary entitled Lessons On Taking Your Own Time, Starring The Snail. If one was of the second school of thought, one would have appreciated Layapriya and learned a lesson from it: Command your surroundings, don’t let them overwhelm you.