James Kudelka’s Four Old Legs makes a profoundly moving duet for Evelyn Hart and Zhenya Cerneakov GlobeArts
James Kudelka’s contemporary choreography can be subtle, cerebral and challenging. His latest work,, which had its world premiere at Toronto’s Citadel Theatre last week, could even be called sly. It has the effect of sneaking up on you, refusing to strong-arm any idea or emotion prematurely. The piece earns its feelings so slowly and imperceptibly that it runs the risk of going nowhere until, quite suddenly, it’s landed on rich and poignant terrain.
This notion of journey is key to the one-hour duet between former prima ballerina Evelyn Hart, now 63, and a much younger dancer, the Canadian-Moldovan Zhenya Cerneacov. Structured as 16 vignettes, each set to its own piece of music , the work follows two not-quite-linear trajectories. There’s the progression of a romantic relationship, from its inchoate beginnings to a place of maturation, coupled with a more comprehensive journey through life itself, from youth to old age.
Structured as 16 vignettes, each set to its own piece of music, the work follows two not-quite-linear trajectories.It’s fascinating to come across a work of art in which your real-time experience of watching ends up feeling discordant with the take-away. Kudelka isn’t interested in virtuosity or any technically ambitious movement here . Rather, he places two very different performers on stage and asks us to consider them simply as they are.
In literature, there are various schools of theory that deal with the author’s relationship to the work they created. Does the text seem like an unbroken extension of its creator’s thoughts, or is there a point of rupture between what the text appears to “say” and what the author, in fact, “means?” Kudelka seems to achieve this as a choreographer, inserting himself in the space between his steps. Watch carefully; there are layers to unfold.
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