First came Jant-Bi with African contemporary choreographer Germaine Acogny's Fagaala (Senegalese for genocide), a dance about the ease with which Rwanda became a bloodbath 11 years ago. A collaboration with Japanese choreographer Koto Yamazaki, Fagaala reflects butoh dance theatre's sensibility of bodies being crushed by the weight of the sky.
Myriad symbols replace narrative in Fagaala as aggressors discard dignity and defecate and masturbate in public, drink, haze out, slide from play into torture.
Superficially, the collaboration feels unresolved. The multidirectional, pulsating energy, which ripples ecstatically through the seven magnificent male dancers' bodies, appears unhappily muted.
But that's precisely Acogny's point: Africa loses its cultures when it loses its peoples. Still Faagala is engrossing and disturbing, sometimes poetic, sensual, even playful, because Acogny neither blames nor exonerates; she reminds us that it could all happen again.
On Saturday night, sex, skin, smoky songs and splashing water burst into the intimate Spiegeltent. And as comedian Fanny Bryce used to say, La Clique ... A Sideshow Burlesque proved how this kind of 1940s show can get your bagels spinning, even if chanteuse Camille O'Sullivan's Dietrich schtick momentarily casts shadows of Berliner Kabarett over it.
But the eroticism of La Clique's acrobatic strength acts is what first commands attention. The dazzlingly pretty, tanned, white-blonde Caesar twins from Poland compete and flirt with the audience and each other as they somersault or pile up on each other like gods and, later, perform a gob-smacking goldfish act.
Darker, smoother David O'Mer is someone Mae West - and half the audience - would order for breakfast. He lounges in a bathtub, spirals overhead in perfectly cantilevered shapes, and dashes his body along the bath to spray water into the shrieking crowd.
Then magician Ursula Martinez strips down to rhinestones, stilettos and a hanky hidden somewhere on her person, and the voluptuous Miss Behave - a brazen, boisterous Andrews Sisters lookalike - swallows a sword. There's plenty more, including Los Hermanos Macana, the snappiest brotherly Argentine tango duo alive.
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