Filmed performance is an odd duck in the art world. For many it’s an opportunity to avail of faraway or extravagantly expensive spectacles from the Met Opera or the National Theatre, or of André Rieu’s Christmassy Viennese extravaganzas. During recent lockdowns it also became a scrambling makeweight, as stages all over the world attempted to keep the lights on.
But even with the most famous hybrid ventures, such as the box-office breakthrough that was the National Theatre’s Frankenstein, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller in variously swapped roles as the creator and the monster, it’s difficult to escape the idea that we’re watching, well, a stage show. No matter how lavish the production or how many cleverly mounted cameras are involved, filmed theatre, filmed opera and filmed ballet look like beautifully made hand-me-downs.
Asif Kapadia’s Creature feels like an artistic breakthrough. The award-winning documentarian’s electrifying version of Akram Khan’s celebrated modern ballet moves as deftly between dance and film as any of the gifted performers on the stage.
“I like seeing theatre when it’s being rehearsed,” the Academy Award-winning director says. “I like shows when other people are creating and I’m not the one under the pressure! At first I didn’t know what the hell was going on. And then at one point, I realised, what happens is that, in the morning, Akram rehearses details, details, details. It’s very much like he’s just directing actors, and then they run with it in the afternoon and perform the ballet.
“And I just sat on the floor, pretty much with the phone that I’m talking to you on, and I started filming. I immediately thought, I think this is a movie. I don’t know what the hell’s going on all of the time, because I am not someone who knows about ballet. I don’t know much about theatre. I have bad eyesight. I’m really bad at sitting still for hours. But I followed the lead actor, Jeffrey…