Review: UNIVERSE: A DARK CRYSTAL ODYSSEY, Sadler's Wells

Getting to grips with what a mute medium like dance is trying to convey is never easy even when there is a recognisable concept like Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal.

That film debuted in 1982 when Wayne McGregor saw it as a 12-year-old and, down the decades, its themes of planetary crisis and mutually assured destruction come through loud and clear.

UniVerse: A Dark Crystal Odyssey debuted last year at the ROH’s Linbury Theatre and seeing its video effects on the larger Sadler’s Wells stage takes the breath away. It announces itself as a work where “state-of-the-art immersive technology envelops super-human choreography”, a statement not short on hyperbole but one which points to McGregor’s mission here.

To be clear, the immersion does not stretch out beyond the fourth wall. Peeping Tom’s Oiwa (seen recently at the Southbank Centre) conjured up its beautifully alluring dreamscape by having a cloud invade from the stage into the auditorium. For UniVerse, it is only the dancers who are encased within the world of cute elfin Gelflings, kind long-haired Mystics and evil reptilian Skeksis. Performing between two projection screens, detailed three-dimensional videos are used to lucidly illustrate a world amid a climate crisis.

Philip Delamore and Dr Alex Box’s evocative costuming allows the dancers to become a variety of fantasy creatures while still effectively realising McGregor’s choreography and helps those who haven’t seen or barely remember the film to connect with its core characters and story. That is handy as, like last year’s disappointing Free Your Mind (another show with largely unwarranted claims to being immersive), things can seem very vague and unfocussed without at least some understanding of the original story. The relationship between the Mystics and the Skeksis has a curious twist: when one of them is injured or dies, the same outcome applies to a member of the other race. This plot device implicitly connects the underlying theme of nuclear war and man-made global warming, two cross-generational threats to the entire human civilisation.

The impact of technology weighs heavy on UniVerse. Like the West End hit The Picture Of The Dorian Gray, the show would be almost impossible to imagine without Ravi Deepres’ films or Lucy Carter’s lighting which both add buckets of conceptual depth and flavour. The use of front-and-back projection screens has been around a while; sometimes it can be a recipe for disaster but here there is an abundance of visual flair which complements the choreography.

For the aural effect, McGregor leans on a combination of spoken word from Isiah Hull and John Cadbury’s compositions. The young Manchester-based poet gives us the most direct indication of the work’s concept as he laments the generational fears, reduction of the polar ice caps and tells us that we should “reduce, re-use, recycle and rejoice”. He nods to the vulnerable in society (“protect the young, old and the female”) and the ongoing culture war (“what is the agenda of this gender war, if not for retail?”). Cadbury for his part incorporates McGregor’s signature blasts of rave music amid a brilliantly ominous soundscape which borrows little of substance from the film’s score.

Quite how effectively McGregor’s message is conveyed dips and rises during this 75-minute piece. At some points, the stunning use of powerful videos and techno music bring this message crashing into life and bring an unavoidable sense of urgency and danger. At others, there is very little clue from any direction exactly what was going through the acclaimed choreographer’s mind when he designed that segment. A tighter adherence to the source material or more visual clues may have helped in places; as critics sometimes politely put, some parts invite any number of possible interpretations. Strange as it may seem for a McGregor show, UniVerse is worth seeing for everything but the dancing.

Photo credit: Andrej Uspenski

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