Manon de Boer: Dissonant

films the dancer Cynthia Loemij while she performs a 10 minute response to Eugène Ysaÿe’s Three Sonatas for Violin. For the Jan Mot newspaper Mark Lorimer accepted to write a portrait of Cynthia Loemij who, like Lorimer, has danced for many years for Rosas, an ensemble formed around the Belgian choreographer and dancer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.

First Glance By Mark Lorimer

It is a curious relationship that a spectator builds with a dancer performing regularly in a company - the pieces in themselves are independent and read separately within the oeuvre but the relationship to a performer is somehow more of a continuum. I remember well the first time I saw Cynthia Loemij at the South Bank Centre in London in ‘92. Seeing the same company for the first time a few months before she had joined, I had, with the speed and fervor of a young dancer choosing his affinities, taken the work as ‘mine’. Cynthia therefore was ‘a new one’ - to be scrutinised and approved.

I remember being impressed, giving her my (undoubtedly revered) stamp of approval during the show, even if at one moment I found her performance a bit over-stated - or was it just the piece’ All those nods and winks between the women on chairs seemed artificial and she too keen in this theatrical misdemeanour. In comparison though the visceral physicality of the floor-work and the exquisite precision of objects and light defining the space throughout the piece secured my devotion to both company and performers alike - even ‘the new girl’.

Broadening perspective

In the two years that followed I saw the company several more times. The pieces confirmed that post-modern, richly ambiguous and dynamic dance could be explored without lycra by real people who could really dance - full of character but without the narrative so prevalent in the British dance scene I was trained in. And I adored Cynthia’s performances increasingly - how she can be so precisely off-balance, a body full of accurate risk-taking, power and well-rehearsed accidents. In the exactness of her physicality nothing is thrown away or merely transition - even her most seemingly vague or unspectacular movements are considered and explored. This, in the realm of choreography, affords us also to see structure and choices clearer. The looping in Dissonant for example is recognisable not only by key architectural moments but in the subtle or pedestrian gestures too.

Close-up

By the time we met to work together in 1994 I felt almost like I knew her. Now the new boy myself to be ruthlessly perused, I was in fact welcomed warmly with hints of
recognition of the near panic state joining the company with a premier looming would surely instill. The odd thing about this sense one sometimes has of a dancer is that a person’s physicality so often is who they are. Every move, even behind the traditionally distancing mask of ‘performer’, can reveal personality - honestly and directly. Surely the case with Cynthia except that in person she was softer, more rounded, funnier. I liked her - a lot. What I couldn’t have imagined, as it is remarkable (and sometimes shaming to us all), is how incredibly hard she works - I’ve met no-one like her. The choreographer is notoriously demanding but it is Cynthia’s own standards that are so dauntingly high in fact. With persistent curiosity she finds new interest, vocabulary and performance style within a familiar context.

Wide angle

Cynthia inhabits movement in such a way that it can be dazzling and personal, but also universal - so clear is the investment and story-telling that we feel her weight-shifts and rhythmic choices, freedom or restriction as if in our own bodies. Perhaps it is because there is no break in concentration or importance of sensation that our kinetic journey is continuous. Where with other dancers key events or photographs pop out, with Cynthia there seems to be no such hierarchy of movement and so we are held, without lapses or interruption. Even in Manon’s film when the image vanishes her explicit audio journey remains, heightening our concentration to make a smooth bridge to the next appearance.

Shifting perspective

In the years since I first arrived in the same camp I have come and gone a few times returning to rehearsal direct as well as dance. Cynthia was always there. Together we’ve been glued in simple unisons and wrapped around each other in duets. I have watched her sweaty-footed waiting to join for a duet in which our eyes meet for splits of seconds to maintain a unison whilst facing in opposite directions - listening for the breath or a foot sweeping along the floor. I’ve heard another solo - she rustling in the leaves whilst I stood, facing a tree. Or passed in the corridor, my performance having ended just as hers starts.

I have written technical notes and given feedback on every presentation of certain performances she was in and I have relished the glorious naivety of being an audience member seeing new works where I wasn’t involved. I have watched from the public, the wings, the back of the stage, the front, live, on a monitor backstage and on recorded video. I have watched outside in an amphitheater in Venice, crawling along the fly bridge in Antwerp (when I was too late to be let into the auditorium), from millimeters away, and in the vast expanses of the Aral Sea on location. I’ve also heard the story about Cynthia nearly concussing herself leaving the stage at La Monnaie enough times to believe I really was there.

I have danced with her understudies (same costume, different touch, energy, phrasing and/or smell) and I have danced with her in last minute replacements where at least one of us was not completely sure of movement, timing, spacing or musicality - being guided with a language of eye-flicking, frowning, micro-gestures whispers and (if need be) shouts. I have performed material that she has made but finally not danced. Cynthia has danced retrograde (a backwards version) of material I have made but don’t know myself. And for Manon’s show in Frankfurt we shared a screen dancing closely to the same music but in separate shots.

Private view

She too was in the public for every piece I did outside the company since we met - the birth of a new company, witnessing and technically coaching me through a severe bout of wobbling, and passing by the studio to offer feedback on numerous embryonic run throughs.

It’s not that our ways of seeing are identical but I know that she will tell me what she thinks respectfully and offer a clear perspective and opinion. She knows her own taste very well on elements of performance whilst remaining open to new things. We joyfully worry over minute details in the studio and desserts in a restaurant. And so it goes on, until this year for the first time she came to a company premier in Paris where I was on stage and she in the public. A new loop completed though I think this is a continuum and we are both happy to go round again.