Boys on the march

In dance, it’s usually the moment the boys start fighting that challenges your suspension of disbelief. Synchronised fencing (MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet), unison goosestepping (Grigorovich’s Spartacus), even the Sharks and Jets in Robbins’s West Side Story, are formation set-pieces designed to arouse us. Last year there was a bunch of ballets made by British choreographers to mark the first world war centenary, which artfully focused on sorrow.

But high tension, apprehensiveness, emotional denial — what’s really in the fighter’s head — these are physically antipathetic to dance’s expansive language. This is why Rosie Kay’s 5 Soldiers: The Body is the Frontline is so powerfully striking and bold a dance work. If you were told that these were actually five British soldiers reliving daily experiences, you would at first believe it, so brutishly physical is their long opening sequence of quick marches and repetitious exercises through imagined enemy territory.

There is nothing in the least entertaining about it. Sweat pours down their faces. Real truck tyres are chucked. Muscles bulge in tight necks and slammed-down shoulders. Where the work takes off with such imagination is in Kay’s intuition that the deepest conflict is where the enemy is not visible.

In most theatrical dance, the foes face each other. For today’s soldiers, her 70-minute piece sets out, there is no opponent to focus on. The IEDs are underfoot, the snipers are hidden. We watch these soldiers go on patrol, darting and circling in rigid formations that make a constant revolution, looking on all sides for the enemy, skydiving into who knows where.

To make a presence of the invisible enemy gives the experience a hint of that gothic darkness of the old folk tales, where men went out into a supernatural world to face the unknown, essentially within themselves.