DANCE

Performed by 4 teenage girls on a stage strewn with tacky fake flower petals, the show claims to be ‘a thrilling collaboration of dance and film’. This could be worded more fittingly by dropping the thrilling and prefixing ‘mal’ to collaboration, since these components felt out of place, but not through deliberate juxtaposition. Instead, the performance maintained a feeling of disequilibrium.

The choreography was quite basic and repetitive and the use of lighting did not enhance the performance, so these cues felt like unnecessary complications which could have righted the technical difficulties which ensued. The performance was generally disappointing, a feeling clearly shared by the cast in their thwarted demeanour and the giveaway utterance of ‘for fucks sake’ from backstage after the first routine. This level of unprofessionalism was a motif throughout the show, as the whispering persisted. In light of the unfortunate mistakes, I will attribute this to teething issues however, the manner in which the girls coped with the situation was inexcusable and oh so ironic that the piece contained ‘regret’ as a theme. Memorably, the narrated voiceover spoke about the inability to ‘take it back’, so it was clear that they did not relate to the material at all.

As a result, they danced without passion or emotion, and instead of journeying ‘through the emotional extremities of human relations’, they painted a much clearer picture of the insular. Again, this was conveyed through the unsyncronous dance sequences.

The recorded voiceover narrated the story, but this was ill matched to the video footage which was projected onto what resembled a creased bed sheet used as a projector screen. This aural layer reminded me of a soothing audiobook narrator, so in this respect the tonal quality of the narrator complemented the similarly paced dancing, which although lacked ambition, it was easy to watch, and can best be described as nice.