May B today 

May B tells of somewhere far away, a remote place that emerges from a timeless era, from a life lived without order or measure, from a tension buried in dreams of strange happenings that cannot be fixed in memory or story. The strength and intensity of May B – anti-theatrical in its extreme theatricality – endure in the work’s capacity to play out the series of cracks and fissures that make up the whole, to tell of births and infancies, of grunts and howls which all combine in a perfectly expressionist procession that forms the sweeping arc of the story. Attempts at description, efforts to articulate are reabsorbed into a mass made up of maternal fable; an enduring maternal fable where the body roams, and, significantly encounters other bodies, creating new paths where patterns are redrawn and repeated. Such Dionysian energy presents itself as a tireless way of shaping the continuity of emotional experience and upheaval, catching it by the tail and shaking it with wicked and lively humour. At the same time, the invention of this grotesque style of lyricism has, written within it, the renewal of what it is ‘to dance’. It holds out in front of itself all the possibilities that dancing has available to it, replacing them as if in a game and playing with them until ‘to dance’ has been dragged into ‘a dance’. And the journey that concludes the piece brings together, in a few suitcases, the way each person’s story deteriorates, as they leave for a destination without destiny. Like a Gavin Bryars refrain, repeated ad infinitum in a plaintive muttering which rejoins and then redistributes all the breaks and fissures, the dancers send each member of the audience a dreamlike image of Eldorados and Promised Lands, as well as possible resolutions to a story that drowns in its own final moment.

Jean-Paul Manganaro