“Costume: €3,000, production design: €4,500...” Oona Doherty’s voice carries over the soundtrack, totting up the costs of putting on a show. Sound, dancers, hotels, choreographer’s fee, childcare, it mounts up to a substantial sum. “And what’s the point?” she asks us, the people who’ve come to see it.
Navy Blue might be the sound of a choreographer having an existential crisis. A choreographer, Doherty, whose first major work, Hard to be Soft, catapulted her to international acclaim, when she captured the energy and attitude of her home town of Belfast with specificity, affection and vitality. Navy Blue is a broader and more nebulous creation. It’s a story about our insignificance amid the enormity of the universe, little dots standing on our blue dot, fighting each other to be “momentary masters of a fraction of a fucking dot”, she says, and it’s true.
That’s not where things begin, though. The first half of Navy Blue is more conventional, 12 performers moving in unison. But notably they don’t all match, in age, size, ethnicity, each is an individual. There’s something ill at ease sewn into the movement, a slight hunch in their bodies, subtle but definitely there. They’re all doing the same moves, but they’re on guard, there’s fear, mental exhaustion, it’s very 1984: authority, freedom, control. And then it turns into Squid Game, gunshots punctuating the lush romanticism of Rachmaninov.
It’s an ode to the cruelty and pointlessness of life. Doherty, who appears only in voiceover, has some good lines: “Nothing’s coming to save us from ourselves, so aye, I will have a double,” she says, like Peggy Lee singing Is That All There Is? The soundtrack here though is by Jamie xx, with swelling synths, melodious thrumming and ultimately terror as the choreography really ramps up right at the end, the dancers jumpy, with ragged churn to their movement and Amancio Gonzalez’s panic-dance of hyperactive limbs.
Doherty’s honesty and wit is refreshing but in the end it’s these fleeting, arresting moments, like the body that streaks through a shaft of light on the inky stage, that are the point of gathering here in the darkness together. This piece could fly with a few more.
