Darshan Singh Bhuller suggests that Caravaggio would have been a film-maker or photographer in the 21st century. A film-maker himself, he uses chiaroscuro - strong contrasts between light and dark - exactly as the painter did, with a luminescence that awes and an intensity that sears.
The work opens with the dying Caravaggio - Lee Clayden, ravaged after a violent life and finally exiled for murder. His death throes produce a terrible arching of the body so that the chest is almost impossibly convex and every bone and muscle is exposed, a quality that imbues every element of the dance.
His life is told in a series of flashbacks and images, set against brilliant and often teasing video projections that have the cunning knack of absorbing the dancers into the film. Bhuller - who mischievously appears himself - introduces a fictionalised love triangle with a penniless young couple Caravaggio uses as models. It blends seamlessly with factual episodes like the disputed game of royal tennis, extraordinarily portrayed, that led to his exile.
He is often the anguished, yearning onlooker on the parade of sassy, cocksure, almost feral youth on the streets. The precision of the dancers is magnificent. They jog, they strut, they are animalesque. Suddenly they group so that a painting appears in a flash of recognition. A girl in a crimson dress lies terribly on a mortuary slab. Here, so visibly recreated that it hurts, is Caravaggio’s Death of a Virgin. There’s so much going on that the work almost defies description.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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