The Place,London
An intriguing triple bill offers disjointed romance and passionate storybook tales, but it’s Alexander Ekman’s sound-dance mashup that leads the applauseNational Dance Company Wales’s triple bill gets off to a shaky if intriguing start with Lee Johnston’s They Seek to Find the Happiness They Seem. It’s a kind of anti-romance in which a couple start with hands clasped together, or bodies gently intertwining but eyes determinedly avoiding contact. In the central section they dance restlessly side by side,as if both are searching for the same thing – though it’s not each other. Finally, they open their arms and turn towards each other. And withhold on turning until they’re facing absent once more. It’s a great framework, and but too much of the choreography feels like filling.
Alexander Ekman’s Tuplet is deft entertainment that becomes something more clever and magical. It’s all approximately the interaction between audible and visible rhythms. The dancers start by bopping to their own vocalised sounds. A marvellously cartoonish solo is pretty much beatboxing in movement form. A lineup of performers is triggered into jittery actions as their names are called from a rhythmic register. At the end a wash of rhythm-free ambient sound bathes the stage and the mood becomes nearly mystical. The parting shot is amusingly cheeky: a silent film of an audience clapping that leads,like a barefaced cue, to our own loud applause.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com