Dilemmas of dissidence in The Truth 25 Times a Second The Ballet National de Marseille's perform The Truth 25 Times a Second, co-conceived with Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and loosely based on Italo Calvino's novel The Baron in the Trees. Picture: Pino Pipitone Source: AP ONE fine day in 1767, a young man argues with his parents, after which he climbs a tree in the garden and vows never to come down. From his elevated perch, he takes a critical but fond view of the world that he has escaped. From high up in the trees, he dreams of other vital and visual perspectives, desirous of freeing himself from gravity and a certain heaviness found in the human kingdom. Thus reads the Ballet National de Marseille's precis of The Truth 25 Times a Second, a ballet inspired by Italo Calvino's novel The Baron in the Trees and choreographed by BNM's artistic director Frederic Flamand. This existential tale of a man seeking freedom has been designed and co-conceived with Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. Put those facts together and you could surmise that "the truth" relates somehow to Ai's personal dilemma as a practising artist and critic of the Chinese government. The visual artist, who famously curated a "F . . k Off" alternative art exhibition to usurp the conservative Shanghai Biennale in 2000, is known for his stormy relationship with his country's one-party regime. He has been feted at home and abroad for the so-called Bird's Nest, the emblematic stadium of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, which he designed with Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron, yet he has also been detained, banned from leaving China and punished, like his dissident poet father, for outspokenly criticising the government. At times, when permitted, he has lived overseas, but his avid use of the internet and film-making have become the "treetop eyrie" from which he commentates on the world and art. In this show, Ai employs aluminium ladders and steel cables to create a snakes and ladders maze of metal scaffolding on stage. BNM's dancers perform up and down, on and under, these constantly reconfigured ladders. So is this all some kind of grand metaphor for the testing game of life, even for Ai's own story? The artist doesn't respond to a series of email questions. In his place, Belgian-born choreographer Flamand, on tour in France, comes on the phone as the company is folding ladders into cargo containers to head for Perth. "It's a specific story of a little boy who escaped from his family and (goes) to live in the trees and decides to never come back on the ground," says a charmingly accented Flamand. But (our show) is not narrative at all, it's more a free adaptation of the book because, with Ai Weiwei, we wanted to do something novel. The pair decided the story was a metaphor for modernity, the challenge of individuals to distinguish their real selves in the face of a reality-distorting virtual existence. For me it's an interesting reflection on the contemporary world because through technology, through the internet, we have mondialisation, or globalisation. When you are on the internet, in one second you can be in one part of the world and then another. He adds: "We can also assume a different identity through the success of the avatar and internet. Take the program of Second Life," he says, referring to the online virtual world, "you can choose a different identity, a different point of view." In the show, the dancers' movements are captured by electronic scanning. Three surveillance cameras create a new screen "environment" in real time at 25 video frames a second (the show's title borrows from French film director Jean-Luc Godard, who defined cinema as "truth 24 frames per second.") Combining real and video images is aimed at heightening the live performance experience. "The living body is very important," says Flamand, "and we explore the place for the body in this 21st-century environment." He is not anti-technology or against virtual worlds, he insists. But by breaking down the distinctions between live and recorded performance, thus disorienting the audience, "you can create new spaces and a sense of time." In his notes for the company, Flamand explains how Ai has transformed the forest of Calvino's hero into a thicket of mass-manufactured items. "What could be more commonplace than a ladder?" he writes. Very quickly it appeared to us that this reduction of the stage design to one very simple element that is multiplied and flexible was going to evoke an Escher-like building, a production plant, a Piranesi-like abstract, an admirable and neglected building site, a world of ruins and rebirths, a giant supporting framework for the dance with the hope that the body is always stronger that the places it inhabits. But what of the dance itself? Flamand's dance style is as far from classical ballet as he can take it. He doesn't talk much of other choreographers; he says his inspiration comes from multi-form artists such as Ai and, unusually, from architects. He has collaborated with several leading architects, among them Brazilian designers Humberto and Fernando Campana and the Iraqi-British architectural star Zaha Hadid. She designed three lightweight metal bridges that the dancers pushed around to create new spaces and even wore as skirts. She also designed costumes that doubled as screens on which scenes of urban life were projected. "I have always wanted to encourage an encounter between dance and artists from other disciplines and revive the notion of experimentation, which is so crucial," he says. He wants dancers "to enter into dialogue with the architecture through a game of constraints, connections, articulations, interlockings of joints and a combination of organic and mechanical machinery." Flamand singles out a word that encapsulates his attraction to Chinese culture, and perhaps sums up his own risk-taking artistic style. He was delighted to learn that, in written Chinese, the word for "crisis" is a combination of two characters. One means danger, but the other means opportunity. So how did the latest collaboration with Ai come about? I wrote to him when I heard it was possible for him to leave China, and was coming to Marseille. He told me that his poet-writer father admired French literature. Ai's late father, Ai Qing, was one of China's revered contemporary poets who studied Baudelaire and Mayakovski in Paris as a young man. When he returned to Shanghai in 1932, the ruling Kuomintang party jailed and tortured him, calling him a leftist. For Flamand, Ai's appeal is that he has followed in his father's footsteps, a rebel with interesting things to say about politics and art. "He's a fantastic artist, and politically I saw all the problems he had in China," Flamand says. Like me, he has lived in New York for some time and everybody says he's provocative and conceptual. He's important to me because we make a kind of collision between all cultures, Chinese and Occidental. The Truth 25 Times a Second is at the Perth Festival, February 8-11.