... modern dance from the akram khan company called ma (mother/earth in Hindi). Far happier with this than the last one I saw, where the dancers all seemed to be smacking against invisible barriers, dancing under strict constraints. Here, they were being drawn, spun, extended, winding like soft sugar or half-melted glue ... which was quite exciting to watch, even if Damian had a bit of a point about how their carefully slightly different dance clothes was slightly reminiscent of Steps ... music that might have been more familiar to me if I knew anything about sufi singing or tathak dancing, but mostly just strange and good -- fast complicated beats, almost all by hand and tak-tak-tak-thum voice, and some bloody weird cello work, including using it as a second drum by putting some echo on the amplification and hitting the string with the bow.
The review was probably a bit too poetic, but fuck it, eh. It's hard to say very sensible things about how the shadows during the electronic-cricket-chirp dance crawled across the back wall like mutant gods, or how funny the argumentative-lemurs-telling-a-story dance was, or how the deep-in-the-mud-of-the-cave dance made me think of a phrase I read once, one writer saying of understanding another's work, that it was like seeing a shaft of light flashing into the inner penetralium of human experience -- or how sad and angry the trees-cut-down dance was at the end, how we could hardly believe the abruptness of its end, so the staff had to start the clapping.
buddleia, 