Eskapist
Music by Mikael Karlsson
Choreography, stage design and lighting by Alexander Ekman
Eskapist – Oscar Salomonsson, Cane heads – Daria Ivanova and Sarah Jane Medley, Tree queen – Jonna Savioja, You and me – Anton Valdbauer and Emily Slawski, Senior eskapists – Joakim Adeberg, Jérôme Marchand, Anton Valdbauer and Mayumi Yamaguchi, Classic duet – Haruka Sassa and Adilijiang Abudureheman, Red hatwoman [sic] – Alina Lagoas
Royal Swedish Ballet
rec. 13 April 2019, Royal Swedish Opera, Stockholm
Video: 1 BD25 Full HD 16:9 2.35
Audio: 2.0 PCM & 5.1 DTS HD Master Audio
Regions: A, B, C
BEL AIR CLASSIQUES Blu-ray BAC576 [104 mins]
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation… A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind…” (Henry David Thoreau Civil disobedience and other essays)
The American essayist Henry David Thoreau would, I suspect, have approved of the premise of Alexander Ekman’s Eskapist – that an ordinary man’s life is so humdrum that the only escape is via a series of far more colourful and interesting daydreams.
Ekman is, of course, exploring an idea that’s by no means novel. Eighty years ago, for example, the American humourist James Thurber created the character Walter Mitty who escapes his Everyman persona by imagining himself as the central figure in various colourful and usually heroic exploits. Those adventures take place, however, within a completely recognisable and familiar world that operates conventionally and to logical rules, while in Eskapist Ekman adopts a much more radical approach. As a brief booklet essay explains, the Swedish choreographer believes that daydreaming is less a negative phenomenon, amounting to little more than an instinctive flight from boredom, than the positive and creative deployment of a human being’s underused brain capacity. Ekman is eager, therefore, to demonstrate that his central protagonist’s wildly off-the-wall fantasies are both wide-ranging and no longer constrained by the bounds of recognisable reality. Instead they are simultaneously both unpredictable and overtly surreal – “a world”, according to the essay, “where everything is possible”.
A lengthy opening sequence introduces us to the piece’s central figure, Eskapist, as he takes a shower. He is presumably in the midst of his early morning ablutions, for all around him we see his concurrent daydream of what I take to be commuters busily en route to work. The fact that their costumes are patterned with broad, convict-like stripes and that they often move robotically as if under orders may perhaps suggest that they (and, presumably, Eskapist himself) regard work as a form of imprisonment, while the way in which a long line of them gradually disappears through a door at the back of the stage might similarly indicate that mundane employment is viewed as akin to incarceration.
Incidentally, you may have noticed, just three sentences into my description of the action, a series of such repeated equivocations as “presumably”, “what I take to be”, “may perhaps suggest” and “might similarly indicate”. There’s a simple reason for that. While the booklet notes include an interesting, if brief, discussion of the psychology of escapism, they contain no information whatsoever that will help you to follow Eskapist’s storyline. Such a deliberate omission must surely have a reason behind it. Is Ekman making the point that we, the audience, also have under-utilised brainpower of our own? Is he thereby challenging us to use it to come up with our own explanations of what we are seeing on stage? In the absence of any authoritative guidance on the matter, it really is a case of your own deductions/guesses being just as good as mine – which is perhaps the conclusion that Ekman himself wants us to arrive at.
In any case, Eskapist proceeds thereafter along its own quirky, unpredictably stream-of-consciousness way. If it is at least possible to devise a plausible interpretation of the early “commuters” episode, the following scenes quickly become increasingly more challenging to understand at any literal level. Ceasing to exhibit anything much in the way of recognisable meaning or even significance, they instead appear merely to present Ekman’s “crazy ideas” (his own description) in a sequence of seemingly random and bizarre tableaux. One such lengthy episode, for example, adopts an overall theme of gardening and we see, inter alia, bunches of flowers, supermarket trolleys full of potted plants, lawnmowers and characters scattering leaves or petals over the stage. But at the same time the stage, watched over by a distant flamingo, also boasts a declaiming woman, a beefy hunk wielding a frying pan and a chanting troupe of barely-clothed men, all of which bear no obvious relationship to those horticultural motifs. I only wish that I could tell you what all of it “meant” – but then, if I could do that, I don’t think that Ekman would consider that he’d successfully fulfilled his original intention. Indeed, I suspect that, in the end, he doesn’t actually want me to understand what’s happening on stage. Instead, he wants me simply to experience it and thus to appreciate the nature and the sheer illogicality of escapist thought itself. We have truly entered the world of dreams.
Very considerately, Ekman offers a little extra assistance to those viewers unsettled by Eskapist’s relentless bombardment of visual surrealism and the absence of a conventionally linear story. Eskapist himself, for example, gives voice to a few on-stage remarks, though in practice they do little more than illustrate his aimlessly meandering mental processes.
Potentially more helpful is a lengthy filmed episode placed roughly half way through the piece that, as Ekman himself explains in a bonus documentary, also acts as a sort of theatrical intermission. The film emphasises, repeatedly and at length, Eskapist’s sheer ordinariness, fallibility and lack of heroic stature. He gets out of bed, opens his apartment’s blinds, cleans his teeth, boils an egg, eats cornflakes, drops a mug of coffee, walks along the seashore, philosophises briefly on how he became an escapist and goes to work in an office – where he spends his time daydreaming about the clock falling off the wall and a pack of dogs taking over his desk.
If the “intermission” film offers only limited clarification, you might expect somewhat more from that aforementioned bonus documentary that’s promisingly entitled Alexander Ekman on Eskapist. Unfortunately, however, at only 16 minutes in length – and much of that taken up with shots of the production that we’ve previously seen or the final credits – it doesn’t tell us much that we hadn’t already learned from the booklet or had otherwise managed to deduce.
Eskapist is certainly inventive, colourful and cleverly choreographed. It’s also visually very inventive and its skilfully deployed multi-level set proves a very effective showcase for the eccentrically-garbed Royal Swedish Ballet dancers and their battery of weird and wonderful props. Moreover, it has been well filmed, with both picture and sound of fine Blu-ray quality. While I suspect that it may only have limited appeal to dance fans who prefer less freewheeling and more strongly story-driven productions, admirers of Mr Ekman’s past work and those viewers happy to broaden their minds with a little escapism of their own will certainly enjoy a diverting and thought-provoking 90 minutes.
Rob Maynard
