“Midsummer night is not long, but it sets many cradles to rock.” An old Swedish proverb.
Writing a short review of two hours of one man’s dream that morphs into hallucination would not do justice to the brilliance of Alex Ekman’s stunning re-imagination, more of a renewal, of Midsummer Night’s Dream.
As I took my seat in the fourth row center of Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre I was confronted with a rustic iron single bed painted white cradling a handsome sleeping man, feet out of the covers, head tucked away in his slumber. Who knows how long this sleep has overtaken him before the anxious Joffrey Ballet audience began to fill the theatre…and fill it they did to standing room.
Two small spots resting on the stage floor on the audience right skimmed under the bed throwing the first of Ekman’s creative shadows laterally across the floor projecting the raw frame to repeat on the wall. An imaginary alarm sounds and a hand reaches out of the eiderdown in an unsuccessful search to silence the unwanted awakening.
The curtain parts and a woman, his wife perhaps, maybe a friend enters carrying his clothes. She is dressed in a pale gray London Fog that had great gobs of freshly cut hay spilling almost to the floor from both low and generous pockets. He dresses in his gabardine slacks and untucked cotton shirt, unbuttoned as he sleepily follows his walker to a rapidly rising curtain. I was a captive already as I was presented with at least forty dancers in a great field of cut hay tossing it high gyrating, spinning, rolling, and undulating in mounds and mounds of hay. There were at least ten layers of dancers all the way to the rear of the giant stage celebrating in a frenzied orgy of this golden remnant of what had taken months sowing from seed on Sweden’s farms. Great bales of hay littered the foreground and backgrounds.
A hidden Chicago Symphony Orchestra plays the haunting strains of Mikael Karlsson, Ekman’s go-to composer, led by Conductor, Scott Speck as members of a Swedish percussionist with a few other unusualt instruments played on in shadow of a lightless backstage.
The sleeper joins in with immense joy that goes on for five short minutes. A voice is heard but not seen and one thinks it is a recording until this tiny creature in a long blonde wig gathered into a thick braid that touches the floor begins to moves in and through the dancers who appear to have drank the cool aide.
Anna Von Haaswolff’s mournful sounds, a mix of doom metal, progressive and pop rock defines the mythical mood of this un-Shakespearian workaday her voice projects;
“They cheered and they toasted
To youth and to life
They danced ‘til the morning
They drank and took flight”
Ekman’s brilliant use of light brought to life by lighting designer, Linus Spelbom, arriving from unusual sources touches even the edges of loose hay. It should be said here that Ekman’s has his hands on every aspect of his work including his own set design and his collaboration with artists and designers to ensure his work is displayed exactly as he has seen it inside his creative mind. The dancers are highlighted in a way that they appear in shadow from one side and landing upon their arms and legs as they rise to await the arrival of what appears to be a straw covered ankh lowering onto the proscenium in tribute to the midsummer, like a may pole. There are a dozen or so great rolls of harvested hay stacked in several configurations. The celebrants begin to roll this hay about the stage and up to the hanging effigy. Some dance around and some dance on the rolls. Everyone divides into couples and sensually slow dance with exaggerated contortions including one very sexy masculine same-sex duet.
The dream evolves as dancers disappear and reappear dressed in gabardine suit jackets, the girls sultry movements is expressed in the now familiar gabardine. They are in shirtwaist capped sleeved dresses that touch the knees and move with the fluidity this fabric is known to do.
Suddenly the core begins assembling a very long table, long enough to seat them all for the upcoming feast. Tables are draped in wrinkled old gray-toned cloths that spill onto the floor haphazardly. Chairs are placed and dancers moving now about the stage, many carrying lit candelabra move to the feast table to secure the subdued light for the celebration.
Others had taken the stage pushing industrial sweeping brooms clearing the hay to a back corner as the soloist continues her dirge.
“The sun stayed above
The moon lingered under
By morning the dancers
Will start to wonder”
Toast after toast of a Swedish liqueur is tossed back until everyone is drunk to the point of confusion and disorientation. They begin dancing wildly but in a very slow motion as if in a dream or in fact the hallucinations that are all experiencing. Clothes begin to drop away as one male with perfect muscled cheeks is down to his tail shirt not able to sufficiently cover his nakedness. His dance belt is impossible to discern at any point. Like being on acid trip all of the dancers find different meaning to their individual trips and they scatter to four winds as the curtain slowly begins to fall and the sleeper returns to his bed.
End of act one.
Everyone in this audience with an A-class of understanding of this level of work needed a break to recover and prepare for what might be to come.
Intermission is always interesting because they need by now to express to each other their thoughts and excitement. I believe that is great builders of anticipation for the second act that always make me sad at the end because I need to see more.
Act Two
The man in the small bed is once again disturbed unhappily by the distant alarm. He rises in unison with the heavy drape that has separated us from the festival. It is now much later in the night, still dark as his bed rises to the high dark sky in the right back corner and the long dining table miraculously lifts from one end, people scattered upon it, dropping off as it rises. A lone tourist wielding an old Canon camera is suspended, floating, taking photos of the melee as more revelers find themselves falling through the dark humid air to the hard earth below, landing in silent heaps.
“Had it all been a dream
Had it all been a blunder
And who was that foreign girl
With a song made in thunder”
At the low end of the ruined table stand two headless men in the same pale gray suits conversing in pantomime, nodding and gesturing. They begin to move slowly, very slowly to making their eerie ways weaving about the field littered with passed-out weary indulgers.
Dancers begin making their ways back to the fold clad only in sheer nude underwear moving incredibly slowly to a mystical percussion. One line formed from each side of the stage to begin moving towards one another and to circumvent the stage. The thought-to-be permanent proscenium rises exposing all of the backstage workings and fly’s. Eight couples sail into individual and differently choreographed pas de Deux each having their separate moments, nothing to do with others. The two lines of nakedly clad people advance one line towards the other until they slowly crash into one another, not stopping until the were caught in a crush.
Ekman is known for his use of sounds and he did not disappoint. There were lots of high yelps, words and tongue clucks that kept us engaged.
A nude baker wearing nothing but a white apron and exaggerated toque darts in, around and out stomping en pointe with a hysterical cadence like a five-gaited show horse. He titillated the audience with his nakedness never making us privy to more than his exposed buttocks and then only in flashes.
“They hoped for a name
They hoped for a promise
That someone to love them
Would still walk among us”
All of the nude seekers began to disburse following their own patterns, swirling, romping and moving in and out of consciousness, wildly happy having found their nirvana.
The curtain falls slowly as we say goodbye, as the end has come.
The sated audience rose to their feet in wild applause and shouts of approval and were then forced to take their leave to contemplate this extravaganza on their own.
From my Lips to your Ears 