fri 29/03/2024

Les 7 Doigts, Peacock Theatre/ Cie Deborah Colker, touring | reviews, news & interviews

Les 7 Doigts, Peacock Theatre/ Cie Deborah Colker, touring

Les 7 Doigts, Peacock Theatre/ Cie Deborah Colker, touring

Mediocre circus and bad dance-theatre is what dance is coming to

As we look on the strictly dieting future that undoubtedly waits for the more esoteric arts after Thursday’s election, it’s evident that the dance landscape has already been blighted - and self-blighted, at that. Somewhere in the past few years a loss of confidence in dancing itself has allowed expressive and aesthetic exploration to become increasingly replaced by undemanding scenic gimmicks and numb circus derivations, subtle matters by dim clichés. My depressed thoughts after watching two of the middle scale shows that used to be common all over Britain and now are scarce as hens’ teeth.

The 7 Fingers, a French-Canadian circus troupe, won kudos for the thrills and amusements of their last show to visit the UK, Traces, and now move on to what they predictably call “dark and complex themes” (a phrase that for some reason people still think means, “Hey, guys, a new idea in dance!”) with Psy, at the Peacock for a fortnight. Psy for psychiatric disorder, of course, but this is not worryingly dark or complex. It is an amiable, straightforward parade of street-performer circus training, wrapped in the slim concept of the performers all being young mental health patients (“Johnny the Addict”, “George the Paranoiac”, “Suzi, with Intermittent Explosive Disorder”) waiting to see their shrink, and prey to sudden outbursts of juggling, hand-balancing, tumbling, trapeze, German Wheel, teeterboard and Chinese Poles.

Actually this could be a great deal more amazing and amusing than it is if the skills were more brilliant and the amount of workaday psycho-comedy reduced. A set on three levels allows for some nice changes of scene from blank consulting room, to domestic two-up-two-down, to three-storey construction for some full-height juggling and tumbling effects that are the highlight of the show.

But just three episodes of middling circus skill in the first part - juggling, trapeze and hand-balancing - aren’t enough to keep the theatrical momentum going, despite the daffy individuality of juggler Florent LeStage, who dances mercurially with his Indian clubs and walking stick. The second half picks up interest, because three of the 11 performers do move on to the higher plane by whisking up little fictional worlds with the dramatic way they reinterpret their skills: Julien Siliau mooching about depressedly on his German Wheel, creating nice illusions of an emotional relationship with his apparatus, here tentative and anxious, as if the wheel were scaldingly hot, there heedlessly committed to the centre of a Wall of Death. There is also a remarkable couple enacting a somnambulist love affair on a Chinese Pole that handily stands outside their bedroom window. Héloise Bourgeois and William Underwood produce simultaneously astonishing gravityless travelling up and down the pole, lifts and holds that appear to hang almost by a spider’s thread, and generally evoke the perilous fragility of love and trust in the show's most memorable scene.

A mass juggling and tumbling climax on all three levels, clubs and bodies flying up into the Peacock ceiling and down again, weaves a satisfying collective effect of skill, but the show overall lacks the wow factor of a dedicated circus or the flair of the best French physical surreal mime.

Deborah_Colker_CruelPsy is a masterpiece, though, compared with Cruel, the new touring effort from Brazilian choreographer Deborah Colker, who is usually accompanied by gigantic apparatus such as huge wheels or climbing walls, demanding acrobatic skills again derived from gym or basic circus training. Now Colker has foolhardily abandoned these photogenic attractions and struck out for sub-Bauschian dance theatre, more psychology, less acrobatic, and exposing as extensive a lack of natural choreographic talent or intelligible imagination as I’ve ever seen.

The stage is largely empty apart from, in succession, an oversized light-ball, an oversize table on castors (pictured right) and a wall of revolving mirrors - O/S is the Colker label. The 16 dancers have oversized aspects too, mostly in the muscles in their thighs and bottoms which are much exposed by ugly black pants and don’t seem easily justified by the ponderous and uninformed so-called choreography, walking, kicking up legs, a little mild grappling - motion in search of intelligence. The women wear a selection of glammed-up evening dresses, some 19th-century in style, some very modern, which get stripped off to furnish the modish theme of girls being lightly roughed up by boys, but the boys are much the more appealing physically, and do have at least a few tumbles and leaps to enliven the stodge.

I am baffled to see that this is one of the three major UK nationwide touring attractions funded in 2010 by the subsidised Dance Consortium, nowadays the main source of contemporary dance to the country’s smaller theatres. It’s a wretched evening. Bread and circuses, this is all most of us are in for, in dance as well as in politics.

  • Psy is at the Peacock Theatre, London, until 15 May
  • Cruel tours to Northampton tomorrow & Wednesday, then Bradford, Cardiff, Birmingham, Sheffield, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Nottingham, Glasgow, Aberdeen and London

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