Compagnie Käfig at Spoleto: engaging, kinetic performance in a terrible venue

A friend and I attended the Spoleto USA performance by Compagnie Käfig on Saturday afternoon. The good-natured show was peppered with moments bordering on brilliance, as the 11 male dancers muscled and spun their way through the two long dances on the program: Correria and Agwa.

But the College of Charleston’s TD Arena is a deeply flawed venue. The problematic staging and the awkward pacing of the dances resulted in a show that I found several notches below the expectations I have for Spoleto productions.

First, let me rant about the arena. The seating chart on the festival website gives a simply terrible impression of the actual layout. Thinking that it would be good to be slightly elevated rather to sit in the middle of the floor, I purchased seats in row A of the Concourse level. But the floor seats, about half of which were empty, extended much further than the chart illustrates, and the seats to the left and right didn’t even come close to the front of the stage as shown. As a result, even in what should have been very good seats, we could barely see the dancers’ expressions. Stunningly, the most expensive seats for the performance were 10 rows behind us — if I had paid $20 more to be that far from the stage, I’d likely be complaining for a refund.

The combination of the venue itself and the sheer physical demands of hip hop dance led to another regrettable problem: some patrons thought that the audience should applaud every time a dancer pulled off a difficult move. But Compagnie Käfig is a dance troupe; we were not watching Disney on Ice. Even one of the ushers started clapping loudly and somewhat maniacally to the beat of one Latin folk tune.

Good for Compagnie Käfig to have risen to such prominence that it can command venues of that scale, but I can’t recommend that anyone see them in an arena unless you get tickets as close to the stage as possible. Hip hop is all about sudden tension and sinewy muscularity; if you can’t get close enough to feel that energy, you probably ought to just stay home. The only really great seats for this Spoleto production were probably those in the front row center on the floor.

Of the two dances, Agwa was by far the more ambitious, with clear plastic cups and water used as props, with the shirtless dancers trying to combine, conserve, and finally drink. But an extended segment with the dancers in clear rain ponchos seemed a little too cute, and the dance as a whole was practically overwhelmed by the sheer physical perfection of one dancer’s head-spinning.

The music, too, varied in ways that contributed to an uneven pace. Rather than feeling like a symphony with distinct movements, each dance felt more like a collage of styles. The whole was certainly not as good as the sum of the parts.

After the company took their bow at the program’s end, they came back on stage to keep dancing in a kind of freestyle, semi-improvised street dancing. And I guess that closing exemplified the problem that Compagnie Käfig faces from an artistic standpoint: do we turn these incredibly talented dancers loose or try to contain their skills within tightly defined choreography?

I wish I could say that at least the sound was good in the arena, but it wasn’t. We were seated not all that far off center, but I was pretty much only hearing music from one bank of speakers.

Here’s a screenshot of the deceiving TD arena seating chart that comes up when you try to buy tickets online. There’s a more detailed and somewhat more accurate graphic elsewhere on the Spoleto site, but there are errors there too and the floor seating takes up a good deal more area than pictured there — which means the concourse seating is even farther away. The festival has other shows scheduled for the space, which will likely have the same issues.

I’ll have another post up soon with a much more favorable review of the Spoleto production of Le Grand C.