La Leçon is the name of an absurd play by the Romanian/French playwright Ionesco. It is about a mad mathematics and language teacher who kills his students. In Flemming Flindt's danced version, the teacher is naturally a ballet instructor. And it is the wish to learn the difficult toe dance that prompts young women to innocently ring the doorbell to his basement studio.
A basement full of instincts
Down here it is full of suppressed instincts. Well aware of the perverted inclinations of the teacher, the lady pianist steps around in small, neurotic squares while she wrings her hands in her sexually buttoned-up lap. The ballet teacher crabs sideways through the door and can hardly open his hands and arms for the common greeting: how do you do. And the student who thinks she is finally going to learn to dance gets groped and ordered about by the teacher: "A little higher", "a little longer", "a little more". More dance in the damned blister-creating toe shoes.
From text to body
As choreography, The Lesson ideally demonstrates how an ingenious and sharp text can become even more compelling and uncanny when it is translated from text to body by a gifted choreographer who clearly senses the essence of the work - in this case the absurd. We can feel it in our bones: from the first step we sense how it will end. The dance teacher would rather see her dead than see her give up the difficult steps in the ballet shoes. There is no turning back. The dance lesson ends ... with her death.
Up in the street, the next young girl is waiting. Waiting to get down into the basement studio and learn to dance on her toes.
Lone Nyhuus is a former dancer and choreographer. As a freelance journalist she works for the DR P2 radio programme Teatermagasinet (The Theatre Magazine).
Nikolaj Hübbe and Gudrun Bojesen i The Lesson 2002/ 2003. Photo: Martin Mydtskov Rønne.