Salzburg's Summerscene
Painful slow-down
02.07.2009, 6.21pm.
Helmut Ploebst
Der Standard

Dancetheater: "Beautiful Thing 1" by Indian choreographer Padmini Chettur Salzburg - Dance always deals with one's notion of time: William Forsythe defined choreography as "Organisation of things in the passing of time". The Indian choreographer Padmini Chettur is negotiating the concepts of time of two different cultures in her Beautiful Thing 1 premiere at the Salzburger Sommerszene Festival.

Chettur is playing with slowness: how to see time is a political question as well. In principle: entertainment to pass time is authoritarian, works that allow the audience some leisure are democratic - and not always welcome. Some people would find it boring.

Boredom can be a curse, Chettur turns it into a gift. The audience is addressed by six women who give brief information on themselves and on their part in the performance. It is during this text choreography that they manage to alter the audience's idea of time, they manage to slow it down. But this is not some wellness oriented meditation programme, it is in fact a painful dramaturgy, the due entertainment withdrawal symptoms are not anesthetized but to be experienced to the limit.

Magical double play
The gift of slowness turns into an invitation to the audience to join into the process of slowing down: it is mainly because of Maarten Visser's stretched, broken sounds that the austere movements of the dancers amalgam with the music to an increasingly magic double play. Padmini Chettur was not he first one to realize that it takes an iron will to resist this neoliberal urge for speed, but her way of moving gestures and motives through the bodies of the dancers is definitely entirely hers. The language of their hands is creating a relaxed, very special distance between themselves and the two cultures they are relating to.