If there is difficult second album syndrome, a similar affliction seems to be affecting the choreographer Botis Seva. Just announced as an associate artist at Sadler’s Wells, the London-born Seva is a supreme dance-maker, someone who has honed hip-hop dance into his own expressive, communicative form for his company Far from the Norm.
But there has been a long gap between the powerful Blkdog (2018), which is still touring worldwide, and his new Until We Sleep, which had its UK premiere last week at the Brighton Dome Corn Exchange. It reveals Seva’s astonishing ability to shape images, with dancers pinioned in cones of Tom Visser’s smoky light, a backdrop of illuminated florescent shards marking the stages of what seems to be a journey.
But the piece is so strongly atmospheric, so bound into its own iconography, that it’s difficult to see what is going on through the gloom – you never see the dancers’ faces – and harder still to understand what is being said.
If it were purely abstract, this wouldn’t matter. Torben Sylvest has composed a wonderfully textured score, and Seva has imagined multiple striking moments. The dancers seem to push back against their own progress, feet sharp, arms curving, bodies soft. There are hands shooting through side panels, mysterious figures in layered capes (costumes by Ryan Dawson Laight) suddenly magicked into life.
Until We Sleep seems to represent some kind of ongoing quest for its central female warrior figure (Victoria Shulungu); or it might be her nightmare. Other dancers might be children, followers or ancestors. What’s clear is that every step is freighted with significance. It’s frustrating that meaning is so elusive.
Yet every time I watch new work, I am struck by just how difficult it is – and full of admiration for anyone trying it. Roommates, a decidedly mixed bill of six short works by various choreographers, curated by the French collective (La)Horde, was another case in point.
(La)Horde consists of Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer and Arthur Harel, famous for their work with Madonna, Spike Jonze, Sam Smith and more. Their day job is running the Ballet National de Marseille, whose dancers performed work ranging from the minimalist clarity of Lucinda Childs’s Concerto from 1993 to the overworked coupling of Belgian company Peeping Tom’s Oiwa, supposedly a retelling of a Japanese ghost story but ultimately a lot of dry ice and half-naked women draping themselves repeatedly around a less naked man.
The opening work, Grime Ballet – Dance Because You Can’t Talk to Animals, by Cecilia Bengolea and François Chaignaud, had a fabulous, driving soundtrack and the interesting idea of putting all its dancers, male and female, in pointe shoes and then mixing street dance and classicism. Les Indomptés, in contrast, was a forgettable duet of emotion and support by Claude Brumachon and Benjamin Lamarche.
Two works by (La)Horde themselves completed the lineup: Weather Is Sweet featured much dry humping in an energetic exploration of sexuality; Room With a View was an equally propulsive and more engaging view of protest, a rave and a riot, with lots of raised arms and defiance. In everything, the dancers were compelling, emerging as strong, watchable individuals, unifying the loose format and giving the night its force.
Star ratings (out of five)
Until We Sleep ★★
Roommates ★★★
