Dancers out on a limb with sinuous groovings
Confrontational choreography challenge audience and artists
a large stone to see what’s scuttling around underneath.
For Seva, whose dance background has roots in hip hop and contemporary, that means delving into the basic codes of classical ballet – and then blowing them apart to discover what the body gets up to when those constraints dissolve away.
On both visceral and intellectual levels, this is a dark piece, where Emma Jones’s lighting design – a matrix of brooding shadows – hints at a society cut off from any kind of nurturing light. Uniformity prevails. Both sexes wear identikit tutus, not in Romantic ballet’s untainted virginal white but in
Dance
subfusc brown-black and dull red: “mucky,” as in Seva’s title.
At first, the group obey an unseen voice counting out beats. But the balletic moves they make have a robotic feel, echoing the soundscore (by Torben Lars Sylvest) that pounds with an industrial feel. When the rhythms take on a wilder urgency, so too do the bodies on-stage and, doubling over to prowl on all fours, the dancers unleash a feral side where spasms of street moves push them towards a new order, a different kind of tribal unity.
Whether you choose to read Seva’s often frenetic, convulsing choreography as a metaphor for social change or view it purely as a piece of boldly hybrid dance, TuTuMucky is determinedly confrontational and challenging – not least for the dancers, who re-order their limbs from poised composure to sudden eruptions of animalistic physicality or intensely sinuous groovings and groinings.
Most of the dancers whose personalities initially stoked Lachky’s ideas for Dreamers (2015) have now moved on, but the current company deliver this mischievous exposé of wish projections and secret desires with a gloss of tricksy humour and technical brilliance that keeps faith with the original while making the whole caper very much their own. The urge to control – to order other people into doing silly things, or the sheer upsurge of lust that’s triggered by a seriously fanciable stranger – is, if you’re honest, the stuff of private fantasies that enliven the dull familiarity of our everyday routine. The dream would be, however, to match the delicious prowess SDT display on-stage.