Review: DEEPSTARIA, Sadler's Wells

Eight dancers come and go in a very, very dark space (for once literally rather than metaphorically). A soundscape pervades the house, sometimes rumbling so low you feel it as much as hear it. Lights disturb and disorient, but occasionally comfort and occasionally disappear altogether. There’s some stuff in the programme about the depths of space and the depths of the ocean, but there are few real signs of either outside the darkness (cf Pina Bausch's Vollmond here recently with its drenched stage). It’s not an easy work for an old narrative fan like me to find a foothold.

But you trust the process, you trust Sir Wayne McGregor’s vision and you trust yourself.

Then I found it. I was back watching Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot, seeing in my mind’s eye some of the most tense scenes in cinema history, as the U-boat crew hide on the seabed, silent and sweating, as the hull of their vessel creaks and clangs under the pressures exerted by the ocean. Men shouldn’t be there.

But McGregor’s dancers were at ease, jellyfish-like in their weightlessness, free to twist, to sprint, maybe even to love, a celebration of the human body in motion. This water made the same sounds as that wartime water, but it was an octopus’s garden, a beautiful briny sea. How so?

The answer lies in the key ideas that animate the work, inspired by McGregor and created by a collaboration of fellow technophiles, a constituency whose voices are less heard in the arts than those who (with some justification) fear the shock of the new. This production is a world premiere, and it feels like it.

Vantablack Vision® envelopes Benjamin Males’s set in a black boxness so profound that the dancers have trouble knowing where they are - and if they don’t, neither do we! The sound (by Nicolas Becker and LEXX) refuses to do anything expected, further challenging the dancers to discover a unique, amorphous response within themselves. It is continuously recomposed and performed by the digital audio engine Bronze AI, real time cultural production that isn’t quite improvisation, but isn’t quite reproduction either. I wondered what Walter Benjamin would say…

It’s the dancers that drive home the fundamental philosophical underpinning of the work - that technology is liberating, a means of transcending time and space, an opportunity to, as a jellyfish can, live at one within the most hostile environments for our meagre senses. 

Where are they? What are they thinking? How are they communicating? In this place, those questions don’t matter - they float, they disappear and return and they celebrate their freedom having slipped the surly bonds of earth.

One day, so too, might we.

Deepstaria at Sadler's Wells until 2 March

Photo images: Ravi Deepres

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