Jordan Tannahill and Christopher House perform in Marienbad.Guntar Kravis
Alain Resnais's 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad is loved and derided in equal measure. It's believed to have influenced the likes of Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick, but it gives naysayers an easy target for accusations of pretension and impenetrability. Very little happens over the course of the film's 94 minutes, and no one can agree on exactly what's going on – even, allegedly, Resnais and his scriptwriter, the French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet.
It's hard to figure how (or if) the film is an intertext with Toronto Dance Theatre's latest production, Marienbad, a duet between artistic director Christopher House and playwright Jordan Tannahill.
Resnais's film is about whether a man and a woman did or didn't meet at a spa town in Czechoslovakia the year before; the House/Tannahill collaboration features two men, about a generation apart in age, interacting on a set of risers. Perhaps the common denominator is a certain ambiguity of time, space and reality. Or maybe it has something to do with the geometry of setting; Marienbad is all straight lines, the action trapped behind the horizontal axis of each riser. (Resnais's film is known for repeatedly scanning back to a Versailles-like geometric garden.) Or maybe it's a reference to Rough House, the duet that House and Tannahill (also) performed at the Winchester Street Theatre in 2014. Like the couple in Resnais's movie, are they repeating something that's already taken place?
Of course, Marienbad was intriguing from the outset on account of the collaboration between a renowned veteran choreographer and a young playwright whose name is ubiquitous in Toronto these days: Tannahill's double-bill of plays Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom just closed the season at Canadian Stage; he just produced the final performance at his alternative art space Videofag; his play Concord Floral will open CanStage's season in the fall.
Marienbad begins with the two men standing at a distance on the risers, staring forward. They are dressed in shorts and Converse sneakers, and the first sequence sees them move in silence across the risers, drawing vertical lines on the flanking stairs to switch levels. They move independently and don't look at each other; no explicit relationship is developed. The sequence ends with them lying in contorted positions – a knee raised, an arm twisted – across several levels, disrupting the horizontal organization of the stage.
The section that follows was the highlight of the 55-minute show. The men sit side by side and begin to discover one another through a process that unsettles the conventional function of body parts. The men seem presocialized – an elbow becomes just as good as a hand for introducing oneself – which makes them confront the other with a no-hold's-barred curiosity, testing what will happen if a mouth is pressed against a forehead, if an arm is folded into another arm, if one torso collapses into the other.
There was profound innocence in this interaction, particularly since it was always gesturing toward its potential for eroticism, especially as the physicality intensified. The men began to flip and fall from level to level, tussling like wrestlers in stylized positions, figuring out how their bodies could negotiate the space together.
But I had the sense that, after choreographing this disarming and intimate sequence, House and Tannahill looked at each other and asked what now? It was the question on my mind for the remaining 30 minutes, in which there was little structure or build in the men's relationship. While character was implied through movement – Tannahill bounced loudly on the risers like a petulant kid, while House's deportment was more understated and refined – the foundation established in the first sequence wasn't further developed, which was a shame.
At one point, House lifted the elastic of Tannahill's shorts, which were slipping off his hips. It was the kind of impulsive gesture that may have been improvised, but the audience laughed, grateful for this glimpse of intimacy between the performers – an intimacy that had otherwise dissipated in the choreography. And while I found the white, subdued lighting by Simon Rossiter atmospheric, like a stadium at night, and enjoyed the layered soundscape of chanting, musical tones and muttering voices by Matt Smith, there wasn't enough onstage tension, emotion or visual effect to keep my attention throughout the second half of the show.
Marienbad continues to June 4 (tdt.org).