Dance performance by Rui Horta

Male and female Santas flirt with the audience and distribute candies. A kitschy red velvet curtain parts the scene, red is also the colour of costumes, lipsticks, gloves and the clown’s nose. Schmaltzy sounds the baroque music with which, slowly but surely, eerie sounds and noises mingle. Red slowly assumes another nature and associates itself with power, violence, lust and blood.

Sweeping emotions, desire and passion, potential orgiastic dance scenes, change with those peculiar sharp cutting sounds that can be created with wine goblets. Dripping liquid into a glass which looks as if it is filled with blood accompagnies the emotional and erotic-filled dances, dances that appear to reveal some of the ridiculousness of being in love. Slapstick scenes as a parody of cheap entertainment are contrasted by gruesome texts and the delicate goblets turn into something oddly menacing; a license to hurt others.

The play virtually overflows with Rui Horta’s ideas and scenic inspirations. Due to its homage to passion and dance it succeeds to stand out aesthetically from a certain scenic severity of past choreographies, for example »Object constant«. Even though some critics were troubled by its baroque wealth and its »entertainment value«, the world-wide audience saw it differently. It rejoiced at the relaxation and charm of the play which differentiates greatly from the otherwise so often too intellectual modern choreographies of German origin.

Rui Horta was born in Portugal, studied and danced for several years in the USA and then directed the dance theatre in Lisbon and later his own company. When in 1991 a dance company was set up at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt/Main, he assumed its management. The name S.O.A.P. is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the soap products of the Mouson firm which used to inhabit that building. For 5 years now, S.O.A.P. is the best-known and most successful independent dance company in Germany. By now it travelled all of Europe, Canada, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia and South America.

»Glass … short stories of fools« is Rui Horta’s fifth full-length S.O.A.P. production. Horta was awarded the Grand Prix of the »Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Bagnolet/Seine Saint-Denis« and the Bonnie Bird »New Choreography Award« of the Laban Centre, London, in 1992.