Four stars, but there’s a caveat. This show is great as long as you can see what’s going on. We’re in a dark club, Ben UFO is DJing, there’s insistent bass, tsk-ing hi-hats, the floor vibrating in 4/4. And into the crowd comes a chain of dancers, dressed in nude-coloured lace body stockings. On a packed dancefloor, only those nearby get to bask in the exacting undulations of their glitching bodies. Others crowd around, craning to see, reaching phones up in the air to try to film what’s happening (and those behind try to watch the phone screen instead), or climbing the shallow bleachers at the sides of the room to get some height. There’s a reason people dance on podiums in clubs, it turns out.
Israeli choreographer Sharon Eyal’s work has been seen on plenty of UK stages, but it has always felt like it should be in a club, with its future-creature androgyny, its hypnotic repetition, its slinking bodies with their strange and intimidating sexiness (Eyal’s co-director, Gai Behar, came from the Tel Aviv club scene). Manchester international festival thought that way, and masterminded this collab with record label Young (formerly Young Turks).
So let’s assume you’re in the right place at the right time on the dancefloor. Eyal’s dancers materialise in front of you, looking like a Dazed fashion shoot, prowling on tiptoes, showing us how to inhabit our bodies with supreme confidence and exaggerated posture, shifting their rhythms in subtle accord with the music, displaying a muscular control that’s frankly awesome – maybe the pure pleasure of a gymnastic leg, or the delicacy of a classical arm unfurling. The energy bounces back between performer and audience, and the clubbers start to mimic what they see, and the live, uninhibited feedback is thrilling in a way you just don’t get sitting in a theatre.
But if you can’t quite catch it, it’s just fragments at a distance, a slow burn over the course of two hours until the finale manages to bring the whole room together in a joyful burst. The idea is sound, but the format needs snagging, because when it works, it’s terrific.
At New Century Hall, Manchester, until 16 July
