IETS OP BACH, which will be performed by the Belgian group Les Ballets C de la B in February as part of the 2000 Hong Kong Arts Festival, is going to be a shock for ballet fans and Bach lovers. This is not ballet, and it isn't straight Bach either, though there are several dancers performing to live Bach played by eight musicians, and three singers.
It is not often one gets to see contortionists, crude sexual threats, knife throwing and baroque music in the same theatre, let alone on the same programme, but this one has them all. As much as such a catholic collection of styles, taste and talent can be said to be created by anyone, it is the baby of director Alain Platel.
'It is difficult, there was a discussion in the past about definition: is this theatre or dance? But that debate is over now, and I just call this theatre dance with a live orchestra performing Bach,' he says.
It is a typically modest description from a self-taught director who never wanted to make it in show business, who often works with non-professionals, and who still cannot quite believe it when he takes a show on tour and finds there is a hotel room provided.
Iets Op Bach manages to be charming, provocative, and absolutely hilarious in roughly equal measure. Ten performers, dressed mainly in travellers' grunge, outsiders to a man, act out dozens of tiny scenarios on a bleak set filled with plastic furniture, TV aerials and a washing line. Usually there are at least two and often three scenes going on at any one time. It is impossible to watch all of them properly, and often a torment working out which is going to be the most rewarding. At one moment, a women allows her lover to remove her leg hair with his teeth, a 10-year-old girl carefully hangs up the washing in the background, another young woman washes her hair and a blond boy with blood streaming from his forehead performs improbable vertical splits.
All the time, stage right on a raised platform, the musicians and singers perform beautiful Bach, in as conventional a manner as possible, given that they are all dressed for the beach and that the singers slouch at a table drinking coffee and reading the paper in between solos.
At a September performance in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, most of the audience were unsure what to feel for the first half an hour. A few brave souls laughed from the opening scenes; halfway through, everyone was roaring and by the end, the cast got a standing ovation.