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expenditure, energy, urgency and risk taking. A body taken beyond its limits, punctuated by the music of Thierry De Mey and Peter Vermeersch, who took up the challenge to compose from a varying scenography. The potential of the bodies in light of reality. In What the Body Does Not Remember , a famous sequence of frisking made one think of a rather rough identity control. Without denying that this exercise had something of a 'return to reality', Wim Vandekeybus today adds: „That frisking, it was also to accept that the search was for something that perhaps wasn't there.” All the same, the dance propuised itself, without reservation, in a furious enjoyment of the instantaneous, of the spontaneous. This energy of movement, if it continues to give to the staged images the impulse of explosion, of implosion or of suspension, has become, in a way, made more dense. Sorrow, the first sequence of 7 for a Secret never to be told, makes an impression with its feel of escape: turns lead through the back, arms caught by an invisible wire; the dancers seems to be pulled by a backward force. This dimension, invisible but perceptable throughout the performance, creates a space of volume and depth, where the surface is continually worked by a reversal of things, a false bottom where all sorts of metamorphoses are hatched. In his Manuel de zoology fantastique, Borges invents the 'Cofus Bird', „a bird which builds its nest the wrong way up and which flies backwards because it doesn't care to know where it's going, but from where it comes.” The secret inherent to things and beings, which Wim Vandekeybus means to make resonate rather than to drive them out, would be this backward flight of the obvious, it is, as choreographer says, „about transforming the familiar into the uncertain.” One of the dancers, Nordine, confides: „In fact, you already know everything about me." At the end of the performance another actor, Orlando, comes to smell the audience. „Odeur is something free, one cannot keep it,” comments Vandekeybus; „By this gest he enables the audience to exist as an element of the secret. The secret in fact, perhaps doesn't exist. It is the audience who creates the secret in the dancers." Dancers, guardians of the alchemy of reality, transformers of energies able to represent springs as well as falls, flame-throwers of images, bird-handler messengers, witnesses of a capacity of ’joy to be something else'.

THE ASSEMBLING OF THE DIVERSE Lorenza, Nordine, Isabelle, Carlos, Céline, Rasmus, Orlando, Lieve, John. Different one from the other. Newcomers, for the most part, in Wim Vandekeybus company Ultima Vez. „After two or three years together, the dancers start to look alike,” points out the choreographer, „as if I had a bacteria and it is contagious. That's a nice definition of the functioning of a company! I create the images with the people; the dancers are my raw material, and the first assistants for the choreography. Here I've chosen extremely different people. That gives me a more interesting variation, less homogenous. But, curiously, maybe they go together better than people who are too much alike. The frontiers, the bodies, the languages mix, perhaps in the image of the contemporary world.” Apart from Carlos, the magpie-man, and John, the messenger-witness, the dancers of 7 for a Secret never to be told slip on, one by one, the 'characters' of the seven 'stations' of the performance. Each sequence has its physiognomy, more or less abstract, more or less magic. Contrary to the first performance of Vandekeybus, the dramaturgy is not so much guided by the 'internal logic of the scenic process' than exploded in a game of drawers, where each lets hatch a whole string of surprises. The musical universe which accompanies the performance passes in that manner as well, from piece to piece, and lays out, through the compositions of Kimmo Hakola, Thierry De May, Pierre Vervloesem, Pascal Comelade, Charo Calvo and a song by Arno, a sparkling diversity of sound colours. The eye listens to the fantastic mosaic of 7 for a Secret never to be told , and this magic puzzle awakens images which, under the mask of the magpie, continue to secretly watch over the uncertainties of that which is familiar to us. As surely as a feather fallen from the sky can plant itself in the ground like an arrow. The dance of Vandekeybus is a surprise in acts. Jean-Marc Adolphe, June 26th, 1997