Named for the sun god of the late Roman Empire, Dance Compagnie Hervé Koubi’s production of Sol Invictus was a spinning, swirling, warm ball of energy and light. An ensemble piece featuring “almost as many nationalities as dancers,” according to the company’s executive director and artistic advisor Guillaume Gabriel, who attended the show at the Granada on January 25.
There were 17 performers on stage that night for a UCSB Arts & Lectures presentation that Gabriel described as “my declaration of love to dance,” adding, “Loving and dancing are part of the same invincible whole that is life.”
The lively production included an array of breakdancing moves, combined with acrobatics and hip-hop, as well as tumbling, capoeira, and martial arts. There’s definitely both an urban and yet timeless, otherworldly feeling to the work — the loose paneled “skorts” and mostly bare chests of the dancers feel both contemporary and almost biblical — and there are some parts that echo tribal folk dances, in the few areas where the dancers work in sync.
But mostly the performers (primarily but not exclusively male) don’t really work in unison at all. They are still “of a piece,” with some of the storytelling augmented by a golden, glowing, metallic, and shimmering sheet of fabric that’s equal to the width of the stage, used like a veil, formed into a giant triangular pyramid shape, and most impressively, rolled up as part of an intricate head spin. (View this unusual move in the trailer here.)
In a talkback after the show, Gabriel described the company as being “all of the bodies with one heart.” Part of the originality of the production is that they don’t use counts to do the choreography; “we only say try to find the way to follow together. Everybody follows the path in his own way.”
It’s a path worth following if you get the opportunity. The energy and originality of this group made my head spin, in the best possible way.
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