by Lewis Whittington for The Dance Journal
“He can’t do that.“ a little girl said during the first few moments of LEO, when it looked dancer William Bonnet was defying gravity. She wasn’t the only one who said in delighted wonderment as LEO was being pulled and levitated in unexpected ways when everybody knows what goes up must come down.
LEO is in his room with his suitcase which is a music box with sounds of salsa, novelty tunes, hip-hop and ballads and classical and he dances to these in those styles for comic effect. Heavy metal blaring out has him upside down in the corner. Sitar music comes out of the suitcase and LEO flings himself into a half-lotus position in the upper left wall. Talk about yogic elevation. Meanwhile, in non-virtual reality, Bonnet’s acrobatic prowess is mostly adagio, and the precision of movement, real and skewered, compete for your focus.
Dancer Tobias Wegner came up with the concept of LEO, inspired by Fred Astaire’s dancing on the walls and ceiling dance in Royal Wedding. Without a room on a tumbler like it was for that movie he devised side by side rooms (one real, one a video feed) with the left side projecting his images from different angles, so it looks like LEO is horizontal when he is actually vertical, upside down when he is right side up, a north-south mirror image- you don’t need to figure it out even though the illusions play with your optics so much you are constantly trying to figure it out. But this isn’t all camera tricks. Wegner first performed this, but Bonnet is a ringer for this, his esprit, acrobatic clowning and movement language is theatrical magic.
LEO gets Astairesque in other ways when Frank Sinatra comes on singing “I got the world on a string” but LEO is not sitting on a rainbow as the next line says, he’s trapped in this room with squirrelly gravity. He gets very dancy with Sinatra, as well as melancholy for romance. Suddenly, the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s 7th symphony LEO starts to draw objects in the room with chalk- a chair, a cat, a table, and wine for two- he waits but no one appears.
But, LEO doesn’t crumble in this profound moment of existentialism, turns up his imagination and in the other room the animals are virtually animated, but a human mate doesn’t come in, so he drinks alone; instead of getting sullen, ends up almost drowning in his own sorrows, but plunges into the comic depths of by way of Swan Lake…but can’t spoil this great escape.
LEO
Direction -Daniel Brière
Creative Producer – Greg Parks
Original Idea by Tobias Wegner
Choreography – Juan Kruz Diaz de Garaio Esnaola
Animation – Ingo Panke
Video Design – Heiko Kalmbach
Set and Lighting – Flavia Hevia
Mr. Whittington’s arts profiles, features, and stories have appeared in The Advocate, Dance International, Playbill, American Theatre, American Record Guide, The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, EdgeMedia, and Philadelphia Dance Journal. Mr. Whittington has received two NEA awards for journalistic excellence.
In addition to interviews with choreographers, dancers, and artistic directors from every discipline, he has interviewed such music luminaries from Ned Rorem to Eartha Kitt. He has written extensively on gay culture and politics and is most proud of his interviews with such gay rights pioneers as Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings.
Mr. Whittington has participated on the poetry series Voice in Philadelphia and has written two (unpublished) books of poetry. He is currently finishing Beloved Infidels, a play about the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh. His editorials on GLBTQ activism, marriage equality, gay culture and social issues have appeared in Philadelphia Inquirer, City Paper, and The Advocate.
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