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Critic: Fútil

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“FUTILE, BUT NOT A BIT INSIGNIFICANT”

Thomas Noone’s Futil is a duet that describes the relationship between a couple in reverse. That is to say, from the present moment of near rupture (parallel dances, looks that do not meet, contact that is avoided) back to the first, intimate encounter in the past. Yet there is nothing insignificant here, given that it is from these trivial things that all our stories are written.

Besides inverting the chronology, the work uses unusual visual angles that are helped by a single scenic element made by Jordi Castells: an inclined trapezoidal table that is now a bed, a wall or a the counter of a bar seen from above. The dancers use this as a frame, backdrop or platform for their various actions, performances or acrobatics. With this delicately outlined “slab” of yellow they appear as the inked outlines of comic book characters, their directions marked and changed in each frame.

Using contemporary research, Thomas Noone has choreographed a piece with a classical base that uses contact release developments and breaks rigid body lines to arrive at a vision of a freer body. This base is not futile, however: with Herculean strength, their arms bend and fold as if made of rubber. Feelings that are expressed by such an extraordinary technique, real and recognisable to anybody, take on a sense of the unreal, of art that takes human form. But it has not; that art has become real itself.

Bàrbara Raubert Nonell
Avui 08/11/2004(Catalan Language Newspaper of Catalonia)