Kylián in Prague again: Last Touch First

The festival of the Netherlands´ culture NethWorks.cz was opened by dance performance Last Touch First by prominent European choreographers: Jiří Kylián, Sabine Kupferberg a Michael Schumacher. The Archa theatre packed mostly with atypical dance audience was for sixty minutes dead silent. Only during the curtain calls the thunderous applause properly launched the whole festival.

Last Touch First originated as an inspiration or maybe a sequel to Kylián´s choreographic piece Last Touch (premiered 2003). A retrospective contemplating above an old photography became a new step in Kylián´s creative work. The audience was mesmerized by perfect execution of slow motion of five characters in the salloon during afternoon tea. Living image gradually hinted at what was hidden from the objective – relationships and stories of people, their dreams and longings.

Last Touch First seems to continue in narrating the stories of individual characters whose acts it brings to an extreme and adds an unreal extension to the situations.  It starts with very slow movements in silence and gradually incorporates more and more dynamic accents. Invisible relationships that in the first version give chills by being unfulfilled, are subject to rich imagination of the authors or maybe the characters themselves. Gestures are strong, almost exaggerated, duets are passionate and violent, the pace is on the contrary still very slow – energy flowing from dancers´ bodies is hanging above the stage like mute exclamation points. The comics evolving in front of our eyes is like a dream whose truth lies in its unreality. The image of the colour of „cuttlebone“ lives its own life. The whole canvas with the stories can be removed from the painting to have only the wide frame. Dancers at the end slowly pull beige fabric, on which the performance took place and all the props along with it. Only one dancer doesn´t care about the space limited by the fabric and crosses it. Something from the dream in the end snarls up in the awake state, such as every frame is influenced by its canvas.

Michael Schumacher and Sabine Kupferberg provided a new dimension of Kylián´s piece. By the means of improvisation they made dancers become co-authors of the work, thanks to which they step outside of anonymity usual for NDT productions. Nataša Novotná and Václav Kuneš, presenting Kylián´s legacy in their project 420people, also presented themselves here in a different light.

Translation: Kristina Durczaková