In her new full-evening show, Jasmin Vardimon tells the tale of the gorgon Medusa, a horrific ancient Greek deity whose head was crowned with writhing snakes, and whose gaze turned men to stone. In most versions of the story, Medusa is decapitated by the demigod Perseus; there’s a chilling Caravaggio portrait of her severed head, howling and still sentient. But Medusa has a back story. As a young priestess of Athena she was beautiful. Then she caught the eye of Poseidon, god of the sea, who raped her in the temple. Blaming the victim, Athena turned Medusa into a monster.
There’s much contemporary resonance here, and a wealth of feminist symbolism. Her Too. But Vardimon casts her net wider. A medusa, in many European languages, is a jellyfish, a marine creature endangered, like the oceans themselves, by pollution and climate change. In what is clearly intended to be a salutory fable for our times. Vardimon conflates the idea of abused women and the abused marine environment. It’s a clever idea but she overreaches herself, and somewhere along the line loses control of her story.
The 47-year-old Vardimon was born in Israel, grew up in a kibbutz, and moved to London in 1995. Two years later she founded the Jasmin Vardimon Company, which since 2012 has been based in Ashford, Kent. As a choreographer, she’s restlessly inventive. In Medusa we discover the cast immobile beneath clear plastic sheeting. There’s a storm, waves, an upended boat, all deftly contrived. Four women, blank-eyed, are manhandled like dummies by four men. An arrogant young guy (Joshua Smith) indicates “the woman who lives in my shadow” (Patricia Hastewell Puig). Can she lift herself up, Smith asks us sneeringly, and one day cast a shadow of her own?
Physically, the sequence is skilfully made. As Smith preens and struts, Puig scuttles along the ground, literally shadowing him. Vardimon draws a clear parallel between toxic masculinity and the toxic effluents that pollute the seas. But she hammers the point home so unsubtly – her men are all despoiling rapists, gibbering with lust in the shadow of belching industrial chimneys – that her message is blunted. This is the case whenever we slide from dance into concept. There’s a nicely realised ritual male combat scene, and a lovely antic dance for four women, who joyously swing their skirts to Yael Naïm’s song New Soul (the music, which includes snatches of Grieg and Handel as well as Aphex Twin and Mogwai, is well chosen). There’s a terrific final image of the men lying petrified beneath the crouching women, turned to stone by the sight of their genitals.
But there are too many ponderous and obscure sequences, like the one where a man walks across the stage with a bin on his head, spilling garbage, or walks downstage and delivers a specious commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. The piece’s strongest passages occur when Vardimon unshackles her performers from concept and message and simply lets them dance Medusa’s story. But this doesn’t happen often enough, and by the evening’s end we’ve lost sight of our snake-haired protagonist altogether.
