Betroffenheit (Kidd Pivot and Electric Company Theatre)

24 February 2017 | 3:18 pm | Maxim Boon

"Every moment is razor-edged, precisely judged, essential and sincerely distilled into its most refined and urgent form."

The German title of Canadian actor Johnathan Young and choreographer Crystal Pite's dance-theatre hybrid, Betroffenheit, describes a state of paralysing shock in the face of something unshakably traumatic. There could hardly be a more apt title for capturing this show's inspiration. In 2009, Young witnessed an unimaginable event: the death of his daughter, his nephew and niece, in a fire at the family holiday cottage. He ran to them when the alarms went off. He tried to save them but was unable to help. All he could do was watch as this terrible tragedy unfolded, absorbing its full horror.

Grief-stricken, Young decided art was the only prism capable of unriddling his suffering. In the resulting production, he has laid himself bare, stripped down, nerves exposed, to reveal an artistic rendering of loss, pain and addictive obsession more profound and affecting than any I have witnessed before. Key to its power is the symbiosis of dialogue and movement. Pite's dance caresses and invades the emotional gaps between Young's words, picking the lock of this ineffable experience via its most human and engaging facets.

A grimly utilitarian, semi-derelict room is revealed as a place of limbo, a hinterland between a back-slide into relapse or the promise of eventual recovery. In this purgatory, Young explores the double-hinged torture of repetition, which is both the bedrock of his therapy and root cause of his psychological torment. Looping thoughts sink their hooks into his red-raw anguish, dragging him back to the moment of emergency. Calm, toothless mantras become easily spun into a scrambling frenzy; this is pain in perpetual motion.

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Other destructive cycles emerge. Overwhelmed by a deluge of grief, Young obliterates his pain with implied substance abuse. His addiction quietens the rush of corrosive thoughts that plague him with questions of blame and guilt, but in the process, he becomes alienated and compelled to use once more. Talking through his bereavement proves equally futile. When a trauma occurs on such an insurmountable scale, words become blunt objects, clumsily fumbling to rationalise the essence of something rooted in the most primordial parts of our nervous system.

The five dancers of Pite's company, Kidd Pivot, give form to these mental demons as a cartoonish cabaret. Through a vernacular of tawdry vaudevillian chutzpah, carnival glitz and game show cheese, Young bargains and jockeys with this troupe as they Cha-Cha, tap dance and clown around him. At times these scenarios enter a Lewis Carroll-esque surrealism, shot through with a shock of gallows humour - it's a fascinating foil for such a bleak context.

In the more overtly theatrical first half, the dancers give physical form to the words that both ensnare and reassure Young, but in the second half of Betroffenheit, this polarity is flipped and movement becomes the sharp end of the communication. Pite's lexicon of gestures is astonishingly diverse, switching on a pin head from jarred, robotic convulsions to sweeping, unrestrained lyricism. As the bodies onstage intertwine and unlace, this expressively complex choreography becomes clearly anchored to the most basic physicality of consolation - a hand on the shoulder, a head placed gently to the neck, an arm offered as a support. It is a bold, brave, virtuosic celebration of small kindnesses.

Earlier in the piece Young asks for an epiphany, but the one we're finally left with holds no solace. Leaving this dark place -  recovering -  also means severing his connection to the singularity of his grief, where he not only re-experiences his daughter's death, but also her last fleeting moments of life. Moving on means moving away from her; another loss upon a heap of losses.

While this show makes no promises of redemption, it is ultimately about survival, although that isn't to say it is neatly wrapped-up. Bettrofenheit is a physical transcription of something deeply personal and ongoing. It is brutal, guttingly moving, and at times even harrowing, but also achingly beautiful and accomplished. There is an intricate interplay of emotions at work, but in the end, it isn't sorrow we feel, at least not in the romanticised guise you might normally discover at the theatre. It is an agonising empathy for a wrought display of vulnerability, like a fist closing around the heart. In the hands of lesser artists, the truth of this piece could be warped by the theatrical affect, or curdled by cheap sentimentality. Instead, every moment is razor-edged, precisely judged, essential and sincerely distilled into its most refined and urgent form.

Kidd Pivots and Electric Company Theatre presents Betroffenheit, to 25 Feb at the Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre, part of Perth International Arts Festival, and 3 & 4 Mar, Adelaide Festival Centre, part of the Adelaide Festival.