The acclaimed avant-garde British/Turkish-Cypriot fashion designer and artist, Hussein Chalayan, world-premiered his first dance-theatre piece “Gravity Fatigue” at the end of October. A full house of conceptually driven fashionistas flooded Sadler’s Wells – and even artist Allen Jones was spotted, who shares the same forniphilia as Chalayan.A typical child of the Ottoman Empire, Chalayan and his family exiled from Nicosia to England in 1978. Ever since, Chalayan has questioned, “how do we hide and pack our personal belongings at the departure of such ordeal?” – a proposition perhaps more relevant than ever in a political climate fuelled by migration crisis and cultural displacement. His most renowned fashion collection, “Afterwords,” was an attempt to engage with such concerns, and was also presented at Sadler’s Wells in 2000: a homely environment where models entered to remove covers from chairs, and turned them into wearable garments before dismantling the chairs into suitcases. The finale featured his iconic table-cum-skirt, where a model stood in the centre of the round wooden coffee table, and unfolded it telescope-like, into a skirt.Likewise in “Gravity Fatigue,” the costumed dancers ventriloquize Chalayan’s own experience of no fixed locality, which stands also as a locus that sets one free. They interrelate between them and, the places and non-places they drift to and from, transform the stage into a series of oneiric containers.Variations of bodies wear out as they play and struggle with the forces of gravity - leitmotivs that counterbalance the act of falling and rising up and that of concealment and revelation. Starring thirteen dancers, and a pageantry of 110 items of clothing constructing the narrative in eighteen sections over 75 minutes, with a non-stop electronic music designed by MODE-F, “Gravity Fatigue” took two years to create.The choreographer/costume designer relationship is here reversed: choreographed by the French-Belgian Damien Jalet in collaboration with the dancers and in response to the clothing and sets designed by Chalayan. In a similar fashion to the autonomy of the ballerina’s slippers in the “Red Shoes” (1845) the performers are possessed by the clothing, for it usually takes over the – rather thin – dance, acting as a parergon and social prosthetic.The first section, “Corporeal,” casts a couple of performers dehumanised under a translucent shroud as they sculpt a series of poses, with Natasha Chivers’s lighting, both concealing and revealing their wriggling limbs; the rhythms of the shroud’s folds divesting what the reverie of the legendary “Veiled Christ” (1753) by Giuseppe Sanmartino would have been like.In “Word Dictators”, a woman in a red dress walks upstage and writhes as her wandering womb begins to twist the garment that envelops her through the use of hidden mechanics and remote control. She takes on convulsive movements whilst three women in the background rest and bounce their arms on the elasticated desktops in a gesture recalling Chalayan’s glass sculpture “Frozen Monologues” (2013). The idea of home is here suggestive of the organic and the familiar – womblike, cocoonlike and maternal – but is to shift paradoxically to other spaces, the heterotopias of everyday life, as a response to the experience of the unfamiliar, or uncanny.“Elastic Bodies”, explores the borderlines of the body through the unhomely, perforated fabric of reality, with paired dancers casting dysmorphic features by extending elastic bands across the stage. They distort their poses, with lighting blackouts offering different vantage points. For the ending sequence, the two pairs join together with a performer constantly altering our viewing slant as she runs circularly. Spatial transformations bring forth an animated linear anamorphosis.A moment of meditation arrives with “Arrival of Departure,” set in a Turkish classical singing of Chalayan’s mother. Three girls move their hips and knees mechanically in a girlie fashion similar to De Keersmaeker’s “Quatuor n°4” (1986), with three more performers, garbed as travellers, joining what was akin to the dance of the Whirling Dervishes. As they revolve, they undo their jackets, which transform into shimmering sequin dresses, arms to the sides and torsos bent forward, figuring airplanes in flight as a metaphor of migration resulting in cultural disorientation. A truly spiritual moment and one you deeply associate with the ripped roots of the man behind it.Three female performers then, cut out and detach from the airplane hull three “Airmail Dresses” (2008) - made of paper which you can write on, fold and post - leaving behind their silhouette, before they attach them onto their bodies, “becoming tools to mark territories,” as Chalayan describes. When they hang one of them from a wire above the stage, which then travels across, Frida Kahlo’s “My Dress Hangs There” (1933) springs into mind, for both works stand as manifestos of cultural belonging, marking a division between home and world.However, despite dance-trained performers and a choreographer involved in this production, one would rather call it an extended fashion show, or even a retrospective of Chalayan’s oeuvre to date. Myriad allusions to his past work and autobiographical references are entwined with new elements that represent his ongoing experience of spaces of crisis, deviance, and transition, which at times he turns into playgrounds that exaggerate and caricature the traits of fashion and modern every day life in a theatrical and humorous manner. For what it’s worth, “Gravity Fatigue” is a heterotopia of illusion and compensation.The production world premiered last week at Sadler’s Wells, London, and will tour internationally.
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