Closeness starts promisingly by opening with the physical reality of two mature bodies—a man in his forties and a woman in her fifties, who are lovers. The male dancer is flabby and bald. The female dancer is wiry and badly dressed. Their bodies hold all the possibility of subverting the rather crude (some might call it refreshing) description of heterosexual romantic love given in the brochure. So it’s a shame when Closeness turns out to be only some sort of a clammy evocation of a TV soap-opera-type love triangle from, let’s say, The Bold and The Beautiful.

A man, Szymon Osinski, finds himself colliding into turbulent relationships with an older woman, Elwira Piorun, and a younger woman, Karolina Kroczak. These turbulences, according to the choreographer Tomas Nepsinsky, are images of ‘masculinity’ created by the female lovers for their common male lover. It’s a sly way of saying ‘two bitchy women screw up an unwitting man’.

The dance begins with Piorun slowly marching along the periphery of the performance space, with strips of light opening up her path towards Osinski. Their relationship is established through a duet where they writhe through each other with an intimacy that never appears again, and their lifting, falling, rolling, sliding, leaning, and touching are marked with aggression. Puzzling over the reason Piorun shows such desperate aggression, it takes me a while to realise that she’s carrying the choreographic message of the female lover creating the image of ‘masculinity’ for her male lover!

Poland’s Zawirownia Dance Theatre in Closeness at the Attakkalari India Biennial 2017 Darshan Manakkal

Poland’s Zawirownia Dance Theatre in Closeness at the Attakkalari India Biennial 2017 Darshan Manakkal

The second duet is between Osinski and Kroczak. A limp Osinski, exhausted apparently from his aggressive intimacy with Piorun, comes to lie atop the heaving young body of Kroczak. What follows is a schmaltzy narrative of how a gentle, empathetic young female lover breathes new life into the battered body of Osinski. All the contact movements of Kroczak nestling, propping, caressing Osinski underline this narrative. Upstage, an enraged Piorun paces up and down the fringe of the performance space— a space which has now taken the form of a steamy bedroom. Here, the TV soap opera love triangle is evoked and its tacky sensibility takes over the performance. 

There are interventions of a pop song and a dance club to ‘depict the distortion of relationships over time’. I quite like the parodic dance club moves of Osinski and Kroczak that Piorun outperforms when she gatecrashes their party with her expert flailing. Escalating this episode into excessive absurd dance club movements might have saved Closeness from being such a dreary piece of work. 

There are confrontations between the triangled lovers—a shouty monologue in Polish by Osinski, aimed at Piorun, for probably being a tough nut to crack and Piorun responding not by slapping but by pulling his cheeks. Maybe she’s infantilising him?

A combative contact trio then follows predictably. The result is unsurprising. The two women develop the only bonhomie possible when two people share a common lover but decide to be brash about the whole thing. Which means only one thing, that Osinski is left alone. 

The last segment of the performance is a solo by Osinski in which he simulates self-flagellation. It can mean many things. It can be a violent act of purging memories. A punishment for his indulgences. Or it can be just inarticulate rage over failed relationships. 

I return to the first possibility presented by Closeness with two mature bodies writhing through each other with aggressive intimacy. How, if stripped of the TV soap opera narrative, the love and relationships it wants to explore could have been liberated from the burden of dramatic meaning and something closer to their sensuous physical reality could have been achieved. Dance needn’t have become bad theatre to tell even a clichéd story of love and relationships.