Akram Khan’s first ensemble work since 2008 is hugely inspiring and profoundly disturbing, terrible and beautiful at the same time. It’s a devastating critique of the high velocity here and now and an exploration of something more meaningful beyond it if trapped people could only seek the vertical and spiritual road rather than the horizontal.
He has hand-picked eight international dancers for the work, which has no text or dialogue and which has been developed principally at Curve, one of the most advanced stages in the country. The dehumanised citizens Khan portrays are victims of the high-speed technological age. They are slaves under an overseer, trapped in a grinding cycle of sequences that are almost martial at times, to the relentless hammering of Nitin Sawhney’s score.
There is extraordinary movement as they try to rise above their subjugation or to break out of it. They move as a body and advance even on their forearms as though in a combat zone. When one finally challenges the overseer and discards the technology, it’s a Garden of Eden situation, a couple’s slow, sensuous and reverent discovering of each other’s bodies and souls.
There is wind in desert spaces, water and fire subtly introduced in Sawhney’s score and Jesper Kongshaug’s lighting of this vast stage area. The work holds the audience in thrall from the dusty awakening and scrabbling fingers of the opening to the fusion that happens at the end, a shock finale that leaves the biggest question mark of all.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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