‘Undertainment’, the new-look lambada and a grungy chorus line: bold dance at Lyon Biennale

The festival delivers a fantastic new work by William Forsythe, pure class from François Chaignaud and a Jan Martens revival that exasperates and enlivensWilliam Forsythe’s new piece Undertainment, for Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company, is fiendishly fascinating. Rhythmic gasps and hoots from the dancers build a sonic matrix in which the work unfolds. There’s a physical matrix too, the ensemble forming lines, circles and grids from which solos, duets and trios emerge. It’s as if air itself had become a 3D maze, the dancers wriggling through its pathways without touching the sides, or each other. The feel is studious, both in the dancers’ rehearsal-studio attire and in the compositional exactitude. On the almost empty soundtrack, an occasional lo-fi hum will swell and subside. It’s layered and limpid, as subtle as it is incisive: Forsythe choreographs not only the stage, but also our attention.Undertainment was one of the most anticipated pieces at the 2025 Lyon Dance Biennale, where Ioannis Mandafounis’s Lisa similarly set up clear structures within which the dancers improvise. This work, too, feels alert and alive. Yet where Forsythe is spare, Mandafounis is profuse: 1930s costumes, an onstage pianist (Gabriele Carcano) playing swirls of Fauré, poetry by Osip Mandelstam voiced in several languages, a tumble of turbulent dancing that echoes the piano’s splashing sonorities and feels full of ungraspably fleeting stories. Mandafounis’s method is generative, and the dancers are breathtaking in it; yet sometimes you feel a good edit might give the material more shape. Continue reading...

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