Allen Kaeja as Satan and Harikishan S Nair as Son of God in battle.
Janak Khendry had a great passion to transform Milton’s timeless poem Paradise Lost into a dance piece. This is a project he has dreamed about for the last fifty-five years and a subject that he researched for several years before bringing his creation to the stage.
For those not familiar with Milton’s epic poem, it recounts the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It is about that fateful moment when Satan tempts Eve to taste the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. She persuades Adam to do the same. They disobey God and therefore bring sin into the world. Pretty heady subject matter, unfortunately, it seems like Khendry got caught up in the intellectualization of the piece and never found the soul of it.
Nothing about this production of Paradise Lost seemed to mesh. It started with the near deafening sound system in place at the Fleck Dance Theatre. It was like being trapped in a Dolby surround sound system that was cranked to capacity.
The choreography was bland, uninspired and repetitive. It seemed like the same movements were repeated over and over again. There was nothing thrilling or daring about what I was seeing on stage. With a poem as rich as Milton’s, I would have expected an equally layered story being told by the dancers. It was not there. Rather than having the story embodied by the dancers, it seemed to be told in the most prosaic of ways with dancers literally miming (badly) what they were doing: smelling a flower, eating the apple, picking something up with lots of over the top facial expressions.
Most of the dancers have lengthy resumes and credits but I would never have believed it with what I saw tonight. It all looked a bit clumsy and lacking energy and vitality.
There was beautiful lighting created by Bradley Trenaman. His lights were the only interesting thing I saw on the stage. Khendry also did the costume design and most of them were colourful and lovely, though he had Adam and Eve clothed in the most unflattering flesh coloured unitards, which looked a bit like sausage casings.
I mainly cover theatre but I have seen all types of dance, performance art, and movement pieces and compared to other work I have seen, this simply did not measure up. Paradise was definitely lost in this show.
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