Body language

The Dance Umbrella season has always been a unique window on international choreography, as well as a great platform for national talent. This year is no different, and the number of international visitors is delectably high. As always, blockbusters share the season with smaller but no lesser entities.

Last week I went to see two from the latter category and was utterly intrigued, though not equally impressed. Those who have faithfully followed Phoenix Dance Company for the past decade might recall the Portuguese performance-maker Rui Horta and his somewhat mind-probing aesthetics. His Talk Show is a rather dramatic development of the formulae first seen and applauded in Phoenix’s performance of Can You See Me. As the title suggests, spoken words, and quite a lot of them, are one of the new creation’s main ingredients. They bombard, caress, lull the viewer, while contrasting with, accompanying and complementing the now physically powerful, now more lyrically paced danced action. According to the programme note, the one-act work explores ‘the dynamics of relationships over time and the body as a communication tool’.

Such exploration takes the form of a journey, whose starting point is an unsettlingly graphic broadcast of an accident and of the medical procedures carried out on the victim. In front of the newscasters a young couple engage in a series of extremely physical acts. There seems to be no connection between the words and the movements, until the two newscasters start marking on the body of the young male dancer the points of the surgical intervention they are discussing. The talking continues, moving from the crude style of the report to the far too familiar discursive modes of a quarrelling couple. From there, the talking moves into the realm of surrealism, and directions are given for a metaphysical trip that concludes inside the human heart — probably the same heart that was undergoing surgery at the beginning of the piece.