The promo material for L’Homme Rare promised “insistent use of buttocks” and wasn’t wrong. Five naked male bodies spend the performance facing away from the audience, showing us only their back(side)s. No muscle is left untwerked; there’s a symphony of bottom slaps; and a quartet in formation like Swan Lake’s cygnets, with arms round each other’s waists, a bum cheek cupped in each hand.
As so often happens with nudity on stage, the novelty wears off and we’re left with bodies, different shapes, different skin colours. Note the hip bones, shoulder blades, dimples, the indentation down the length of the spine. Covered in a sheen of sweat, their forms are abstractly beautiful – except a body is never really abstract. Deliberately objectified, perhaps – that’s one of the themes in this work by Nadia Beugré, a choreographer from Ivory Coast, now based in France, showing as part of this year’s London international festival of theatre.
