Léa Tirabasso: Starving Dingoes review – uncompromising medical drama in dance
Sometimes you see shows you don’t enjoy but find you have to admire, for their singularity, their bullish lack of compromise and the commitment of the performers. Léa Tirabasso’s Starving Dingoes is one such show.
Tirabasso had ovarian cancer some years ago, and in the creation of this piece she worked with two oncologists, looking at a kind of cellular death called apoptosis. She’s not the first choreographer to engage in scientific research only to leave you little wiser about it by the end of the show. Such are the limits, often, of contemporary dance.
But it can do other things. Some of the things the five dancers, dressed in rehearsal gear, manage to manifest on the stage are: jittery, jumpy energy; a tightly conjoined community, reliant on each other but sometimes also at loggerheads; sudden implosions followed by healing; an unsettling sense of anxiety and desperation; bodily functions, fluids and urges; relentlessness and exhaustion.
There’s also a scene where a woman suckles a man’s hairy chest like a baby, which may give rise to a weird cross between tenderness and revulsion. Tirabasso and her dancers bring a dogged intensity to the stage, that’s for certain, and it’s all soundtracked by the repetitive thud of a mildly headache-inducing beat. One thing bleeds into another, like a fever dream (or nightmare). In their jolting, scrambling and quivering, the dancers don’t seem particularly human – interestingly, among the credits are a philosophy advisor, a clown and an animal transformation coach.
When you do know a little about Tirabasso’s intentions – in apoptosis, damaged cells die in a kind of selfsacrifice, to protect healthy ones – some of this makes sense. Often in the choreography one dancer seems to be in trouble, unstable. Sometimes the others rally around, or else they retaliate. It echoes the malfunctions in the body: do you repair or reject? What are the mechanics of survival? Starving Dingoes is very much a “show, don’t tell” situation, eccentrically illustrating the microscopic dramas of life and death going on inside our bodies every moment.
At the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Brighton, on 9 March