Nederlands Dans Theater's Last Touch First in super slow motion
Last Touch First is dance-theatre performed in slow-motion. Get ready to have your perceptions changed, writes Edmund Lee
IN WHAT LOOKS LIKE a Victorian parlour scattered with dust covers, six performers in period clothing move slowly, as if hypnotised, acting out indeterminate Chekhovian impressions.
Not a single word is spoken during this hour of extreme slow motion, which is only sporadically interrupted by short accelerations of tempo.
This is Last Touch First, the first collaboration between Jiri Kylián, the renowned Czech choreographer and former artistic director of Nederlands Dans Theater, and the Amsterdam-based American dancer-choreographer Michael Schumacher. Kylián, 66, has many positive things to say about his younger collaborator.
“Michael is a highly creative and respected artist in the world of theatre,” he says. “I knew him for many years as a dancer, coach, teacher, choreographer and improviser.” Schumacher previously co-choreographed the Shakespearean experiment Queen Lear with Sabine Kupferberg, who is Kylián’s partner and a cast member of Last Touch First.
Kylián says that this piece is very close to his heart. “It is totally unique and completely unlike anything I have created before,” he says. Presented as part of the Hong Kong Arts Festival, it will be performed on February 26 and 27 after the screening of Car Men, a dance film conceived and choreographed by Kylián, and directed by the Dutch filmmaker Boris Paval Conen.