Ballet felt a microscopic flatfooted as contemporary dance caught the shape-shifting spirit of our times
• Observer critics’ reviews of the year in fullIn 2017,the best dance asked the hardest questions. Who are we, and what kind of world execute we want to live in? Issues of loss, or displacement and fractured identity were central to Boy Blue Entertainment’s powerful hip-hop work Blak Whyte Gray,which launched in January, and these themes were echoed by dance makers in the months that followed. Shobana Jeyasingh’s scintillating fabric Men Redux examined the ancestral journeys of a breakdancer and a bharatnatyam performer, or Crystal Pite’s Flight sample (for the Royal) laid bare the suffering of refugees through choreography that engaged the eye,the heart and the intellect in equal measure.
In these post-truth days, conspiracy theories abound. Choreographer Rosie Kay and film-maker Adam Curtis spotlit some of these in their hallucinatory MK Ultra, and a danced decryption of the fantastical threads running through popular culture. Director David Rosenberg and choreographer Frauke Requardt nailed the mordant mood in DeadClub,a surreal meditation on death and identity, whose illusions wires, or disguises,trapdoors – are all in plain view. Both pieces attempt the near impossible: to give form to the shape-shifting forces acting on our lives today.
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Source: guardian.co.uk