Image courtesy of Benedict Johnson
A performed conversation through time
The following are extracts from reviews of Gertrud as part of the Place Prize 2008. They are linked (where possible) to the originals.
Simon Ellis’ Gertrud, by contrast, is a composition of real depth and resonance. Set to a Rachmaninov elegy and an imagined monologue by Gertrud Bodenwieser, the Austrian dancer and teacher who was forced into exile by the Nazis, the piece unites fragmentary photographic images and tattered snatches of choreography in an attempt to animate such memories of Bodenwieser as still exist. The task is evidently a hopeless one. A slide supposedly showing summer in Vienna before the Anschluss is little more than a grainy blur, and Bodenwieser’s choreography no longer makes sense. ‘It's all so ugly,’ she says, as Ellis wrestles with some obscure sequence. Soon we hear her calling through the enfolding darkness, warning him that he too will vanish and be forgotten. ‘Your solitude will engulf you... dancing will not help’. I loved this piece, and thrilled to its existential tone.
Luke Jennings – The Observer, 21 September 2008By contrast, this performance of Gertrud by Simon Ellis, confirmed to me that it is a worthy finalist: a mature, complete and fascinating work that plays with ideas of time, mortality and memory through an imagined conversation between a choreographer who has been dead for nearly 50 years and her dancer. The spoken text is brilliant, both in its composition and delivery (by Shona Dunlop-Mactavish) and I found it to be equally compelling at the second viewing. It is a work about dance, with – I think – a subliminal theme about dance as a proxy for life, rather than a dance work, but it is undoubtedly a piece of physical theatre that deserves its place in this Final.
Graham Watts – Ballet Magazine, 18 September 2008Simon Ellis’s Gertrud, a shadowy, imaginary and quietly multimedia dialogue between him and a long-dead German choreographer, bravely goes out on a conceptual limb. Ellis cleverly couches criticism of the piece’s pretensions inside a disembodied running commentary from beyond the grave.
Donald Hutera – The Times, 19 September 2008
