Sutra @ EFT

Sutra has been knocking around for a while - I managed to miss it two years ago when I was in Prague on a rare trip outside of Glasgow for the Tanec Praha - and choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui has been around for longer. I saw one of his works in Tramway, and it came straight out of that spirited Belgian choreographic school that I associate with Les Ballets C de la B: a purgatorial dance of death and rebirth, featuring a bit - I'm pretty sure - when Jesus turned up to save the various disgruntled souls from an eternity moaning at each other.

Cherkaoui's collaborators - Antony Gormley (he did that big northern angel, and wasn't he involved in getting people up on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square?) and the Shaolin Temple - are a rather cool combination. The Shaolin temple can't help but evoke king fu action moves, or a Wu Tang b-side when they used to be good, and Gormley is surprisingly sensitive when building for dance. 

Originally, Cherkaoui danced and choreographed, but he has been replaced on this tour by Ali Thabet (another former member of C de la B). However, there are still the seven monks from the temple and the iconic wooden boxes that feature in the more spectacular scenes and give the dancers plenty to groove with. 

Despite not having seen the production, I am assuming that I am on fairly safe ground when I suggest that it has a spiritual thrust (the title is a clue, I hope). Back in the day, when I started off my career in criticism, I was reticent to accept that dance could be a useful medium for expressing Big Ideas. This was more true for scientific concepts, and I have seen some good companies blow it in trying to express evolution and quantum physics in movement: Chaos and Contingency, however, is a recent example of how a mathematical theory can inform and inspire choreography of rare beauty. And I have found, thanks to the work coming out of Belgium and beyond, that dance is uniquely suited to the exploration of metaphysics.

It's partially because it isn't tied down to the literalism of words - explaining a scientific idea in a scripted play can easily turn into an eye-watering lecture - and the truth of dance has the same abstract quality as the truth of metaphysics: its ontological status is not so absolute, yet its applications are manifold. 

We'll just pretend that last paragraph was edited out, shall we? 

Instead, let me talk about how Sutra was made with real monks from the original Shaolin Temples - not the ones from associated temples who are featured in the more commercial shows. And 

Ali Thabet first worked with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui in 2004 when he performed in Tempus Fugit with the les ballets C de la B.

Birmingham Hippodrome      Tue 7 & Wed 8 May    

Brighton Dome                      Fri 10 & Sat 11 May    

The Lowry, Salford                Tue 14 & Wed 15 May            

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh             Fri 17 & Sat 18 May    

Problems

If there is one word I'd like to keep from the vast lexicon of pretentious art speak, it is "problematise." I haven't seen it so much lately, but it used to be fashionable. Performers in the Live Art area would frequently claim that their work intended to problematise their content - effectively taking accepted ideas and finding out what was wrong with them.

My current explorations into comedy have led me to conclude that comedians often problematise matters to get a laugh. Stewart Lee's good at this - better than he is at being funny, at any rate. When he talks about nostalgia, for example, he deconstructs the lazy attempts by comedians like Peter Kay to squeeze the chuckles out of supposed shared memories.

Science, in its methodological foundations, is very good at this. When Darwin took a break from marveling at life's diversity, he asked how the hell it came about. Posing problems presents a powerfully positive process for positing possible practical projects.

This is one of those rare bits of jargon that illuminate rather than mystify. And it seems that the critical project is a process of problematisation. When critics objected to Jim Davidson's assumption that a joke excused all manner of obnoxious language, they identified a battle-ground that has probably done more to expose the dangers of racist language than any number of amendments to Hate Speech legislation.

This rather tedious soul-searching does have a purpose. Over the past year, I have made various comments mocking Marxism, despite having tremendous sympathy with aspects of its attitude towards the oppression of capitalism. I have also expressed irritation at the way wonderful art is frequently obscured by the bullshit that serves for explanations.

Very slowly, I have realised that it isn't enough to complain. I have to have some solid foundation to my objections. I am championing the word "problematise" as a sort of credo. This is what I do. The reason I can bear Lee's rambling journeys around his ego is that they are frequently challenges to the simple assumptions that I live by.

But of course, this soul searching came up after a real life event. Following the election of the new Pope, my Facebook account had a rash of friends' updates - friends whom I value and share certain political and social values. Most of these had something negative to say about the Pope.

It's not that I have a great deal of time for any organisation that doesn't pay me, or have me in a leadership role. And I have a harder line on the Vatican's attitude to women than many of its critics: where they are content to call it "sexist," a term better used to describe the script of On The Buses, I regard a hierarchical structure that systematically excludes women as misogynistic.

But Pope Francis is going to problematise matters. It wasn't enough for him to break with tradition and wash the feet of some criminals on Maundy Thursday. He washed some women's feet. He washed some Muslim's feet.

It doesn't make up for two thousand years of oppression. But it is a start. It might even be a sign.

Another one of Stewart Lee's monologues praises Political Correctness. He notes that Political Correctness has, at the least, encouraged the Conservatives to be more creative in hiding their racism. He sees PC as being a basic attempt to get people to talk about each other in a respectful manner.

I guess Reginald Hunter hasn't heard this particular routine - his rather bizarre campaign to normalise the N-Word seems to laugh in the face of the most commonly accepted resistance to hate speech.

I guess my defence of the Pope is PC gone mad. It's living in Glasgow: anytime I hear anti-Catholic talk, I don't assume it is bold atheism making a claim for a rational morality. I assume it is a sectarian chant and that a bunch of Rangers' fans are about to come around the corner.

When Frankie Boyle launches into one of his rants about the Church, I always see a fourteen year old boy trying to convince a circle of six foot lads wearing blue and white scarves that he isn't a Tim.