A dance show without dancers puts the audience centre stage
‘It was a first, as an audience member, to feel the heat of lights on my face’
Hulls/Sawhney/ Carter: No Body Sadler’s Wells
The audience comments I heard on the opening night of No Body – between themselves, and to the charming Sadler’s Wells employees on hand to guide us around – ranged from “I feel quite disconcerted by how good that was” to “Erm, I seem to have lost my family”.
For this is no ordinary dance show, but one of Sadler’s most intriguing experiments yet: an immersive, promenade, multi-room dance show with installations created by some of the biggest behind-the-scenes talents in dance – but with, as its title suggests, not a single live-performing dancer. It feels as if almost the whole of Sadler’s Wells is taken over, from stage to stairwells. And, although some pieces last a fixed length of time, others you could, in theory, spend all day gawping at. (The whole thing took me 90 minutes to get around.)
The project starts with a bang, in the form of Lightspace, by Michael Hulls (longtime collaborator of choreographer Russell Maliphant). This sees each member of the 130-orso-strong audience (of which there are three or four each night, at staggered times) ushered on to the stage itself, to find light – and indeed light bulbs – coming at them in all manner of ways.
You could argue, of course, that the audience effectively are the dancers, although no one would ever have mistaken our motley crew for the pantherine members of (say) Rambert, and it was notable how little people moved throughout Lightspace’s 30 minutes: once each of us found a space, we generally stayed put.
As for what actually happens, surprise is important, so I’ll go easy on the details here. But I will say that it was a first, as an audience member, to feel the heat of lights on my face, and it is also remarkable – as Hulls’s dazzling but intangible edifices and composer Mukul’s electronica whirl about your eyes and ears – to realise just how much sensory input real dancers have to propel them, mid-performance. In evoking various Tate Modern Turbine Hall creations, the piece also raised the question: what in fact are many lightbased installations, but dance shows sans dancers?
As for the rest, composer Nitin Sawhney’s three-tiered trawl through Sadler’s history, Indelible, is sonically and visually pretty but disposable. Siobhan Davies’s and David Hinton’s infinite re-looping of the film the
Running Tongue is an appealingly optimistic concept that goes everywhere and nowhere. And Maliphant’s triptych of projected writhing, semi-naked bodies – Kairos – is sumptuous eye-candy that rivets for a minute or two, but not much longer.
The most mixed piece is the threepart Hidden, by another lighting expert, Lucy Carter. The first two sections ( Wigs and Wardrobe, and
Control Room) are little more than tours of the rooms in question, complete with head-shaped wigstands placed here and there in creepy,
Silence of the Lambs- ish style in lieu of people. Three of them are positioned by a window, gazing out wistfully at the Shakespeares Head pub over the road, and I must say that at this point in the proceedings I rather knew how they felt. However, the third section, Light
Store, is a treat. About 15 of you are ushered into that very room which at first is in complete, pitch-blackness and proceeds to come to life in the most delightful and symphonic way. Again, surprise is all.
The whole thing is, then, of mixed artistic value. But in terms of sheer differentness, it scores highly, and I’ve certainly spent worse hour-and-a-halfs at dance shows that did have dancers.