Alexander Ekman’s Eskapist (★★★★★) is a ballet that dives into the illusions conjured by one man’s imagination – nominally the eponymous Eskapist (Oscar Salomonsson), but really we’re looking at the fertile, roving mind of Ekman himself.
The Swedish choreographer is best known in the UK for a couple of clever, witty short works made for small companies around a decade ago (Cacti, Tuplet). But since then he’s been scaling up, choreographing for major European ballet companies, including two epic works for Royal Swedish Ballet: Midsummer Night’s Dream (2015) and Eskapist (2019). The latter especially capitalises on the scale and versatility of company and venue, a vast stage extended over the front stalls, on which Ekman offers a bombardment of fantastical images, realised with the help of Danish fashion designer Henrik Vibskov, who does a Mad Hatter’s couture party of eccentrically structured silhouettes. There are cone-headed women with plants growing out of their scalps, two men covered in grass, a stage full of Pharrell hats. There’s a man taking a shower in the middle of the stage, random vocal expulsions, curtains opening and closing, stages rising and falling. (This is a post-Pina Bausch, post-William Forsythe’s Impressing the Czar world.)
Following someone else’s dreamlike tangent doesn’t always make for fulfilling viewing, but Ekman is engaging in his unpredictability. It helps that it’s so visually striking, but the randomness is at the service of a bigger idea. Ekman drops hints and motifs and meaning untangles then coalesces, with a short film channelling the mood of a Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman movie, a wide-eyed Salomonsson seeking to escape a mundane life by submitting completely to his own imaginary world.
And the dancing? It drifts from classical-ish ballet to a step that looks like the running man; bare feet to pointe shoes to crazy platforms. Ekman is less interested in establishing a choreographic style than the right atmosphere at each moment, in a total meshing of movement, design and music (by Mikael Karlsson).
Ekman also finds hypnotic pleasure in the company moving as one, creating a morphing momentum that’s seen to great effect in the opening of Midsummer Night’s Dream (★★★★☆), as the curtain rises on the dancers thrashing rhythmically in a golden wheat field. This midsummer night is not Shakespeare’s – although it shares some themes of intoxication, confusion and desire – but the annual Swedish festival where Ekman’s countrymen go all-out with the boozy celebrations (and the rolls in the hay are literal and metaphorical).
One Swedish tradition has it that if you put seven flowers under your pillow that night, you’ll dream of your future spouse. Dragoș Mihalcea’s central character, The Dreamer (another one!) does just that, and we find ourselves in his unconscious in the wee hours, a place of off-kilter senses, secrets and intimacies, and a flock of women wearing only pointe shoes, boyfriend shirts and just-got-out-of-bed hair. More than Mihalcea, though, the person around whom this show orbits is goth-art-pop singer Anna von Hausswolff, wandering through the scenes. She has a voice that sees your soul: rich, pure and soaring in Kate Bush swoops over another haunting score from Karlsson.
Both works are beautifully filmed with cinematic scope by director (and former dancer) Tommy Pascal, giving us grand sweep and fine detail and doing justice to Ekman’s audacious and compelling spectacle. There’s no one else in ballet making work quite like this.
These ballets are available to watch on Marquee TV, part of a series of five works by Ekman.
