WOMEN AMONG THE HORSES engl | timefellows

WOMEN AMONG THE HORSES

Productionperiod: 2010

WOMEN AMONG THE HORSES
A dance of memory, desolation, and return

“The four women have returned.
For one hundred and eleven years, they pursued the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse through the worlds.
They have defeated them.
In their wake: the horses, silent and watchful…

But all the humans are gone.
All — except one woman,
who, in waiting for the warriors’ return, seems to have lost all sense of time and purpose,
in a place where nature has long since vanished.”

These words read like the prologue — or the epilogue — of a myth yet to be written, a matriarchal cosmology echoing through a world in ruins.
Or perhaps they belong to a theatre of the absurd — a lost fragment from Samuel Beckett, whose questions have never been more relevant.

With quiet irony, these lines flicker across the theatre’s bare walls, just before the five dancers of the My Lovely White Dog dancecompany step into the light.

This is not a conciliatory piece.
It is an uncompromising dance — raw, political, unflinching.
It speaks of the fading bond between humans and the natural world.
Of memory slipping away.
Of identity disintegrating.
Of the silence that follows when we forget where we come from.

And yet, it is a work brimming with strange poetry.
Visions that are both haunting and tender.
A choreography that cracks like dry earth, trembles like a breath held too long,
moves with the urgency of a dream trying not to be forgotten.

Conceived by French choreographer Nathalie Larquet and carried by her dancers,
the piece speaks a language of bodies — precise, powerful, and wide open to the unspeakable.

Above all, it dares to offer hope:
“The most beautiful thing,” it says,
“is to take fear away from a horse
and to earn its trust —
for they are the ones who guide the souls…”

COLD WINTER NIGHT

‘WOMEN AMONG THE HORSES’ by MY LOVELY WHITE DOG-dancecompany at the Alte Wachsfabrik

Deep in snow on a freezing cold night, far away from the city centre, the wax factory lies there on this evening. A fairytale ambience, but you can also sense the hostility of the landscape. Unprotected, there would be no chance of surviving for long. The dance performance ‘Women among the Horses’ by Nathalie Larquet fits in with this wintry cold. At the beginning, a woman in light-coloured clothing sits forlornly next to a horse saddle in the dark. A curtain hanging in front of a window opens and hard white light falls on the scene. Four other women dressed in black and wearing blindfolds join them. They walk through the room, groping, searching, talking incomprehensibly to each other. In between, the woman from the beginning dances a desperate dance. She lies on the floor, stretches all her limbs upwards, bows her head, stands on her knees, shakes her upper body with an expressionless expression. What has happened to her? What has she experienced? The scene is enigmatic, dark and mysterious. Again and again, bizarre images emerge: One of the women comes in with a tree stump with a knife stuck in it, another draws large circles on the floor with a long wooden stick, a third paints her lips red and kisses her legs with them in provocative poses.

Each dances on her own. Contact is rarely made. They all seem to be trapped in their own bodies like prisoners who can no longer find a way out, wandering aimlessly. The dance language – in a choreography by Nathalie Larquet (who also dances herself) – speaks for itself, is powerful and exciting. Thematically, as a video projection at the beginning explains (as does the programme note), it is about a doomsday mood, the alienation of man from nature, loss of identity and memory. Major themes that are realised associatively through atmospherically dense images – without providing answers. The set is mainly made up of withered leaves in which the dancers repeatedly turn and roll around: a barren, lost place, gloomy, lonely and wintry, a poetic parallel world. There is a glimmer of hope at the end, when one of the four dancers dressed in black places a reassuring hand on the fifth woman’s shoulder. And with this spark of warmth and comfort, the audience is released back into the icy snowy night.
Stephanie Torloxten