Photo: Chris Nash
It’s safe to say there aren’t many contemporary dance shows which begin like a children’s TV show, and end in bodily fluids. German choreographer Frauke Requardt, flanked by her two ‘boys’ Neil Callaghan and Jacob Ingram-Dodd, sit in bad sweaters surrounded by toy building blocks. ‘Haha, they’re watching us’, mime the men, using kids’ voices.
What follows is a psychedelic foray into the vagaries of motherhood, with toy-fighting, wind-up toys, dancing toadstools, kazoos and turds. It’s like regression therapy, going back into birth, and then into an approximation of dinosaurs. A too-close, Freudian tangle of limbs in a knotty dance turns into a swaggering French sixties cinema workout.
An acid nightmare, it is tender, violent and kind of batshit bonkers with moments of genius- and all oddly moving. The audience may feel limbs are rearranged. The (atom heart) mother of all contemporary dance shows.
(Lorna Irvine)
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