This strange, otherworldly show lived up to its name
DANCE
7 Dances for 7 People ★★★
Northcote Town Hall, until September 19
Yes, there are indeed seven dances – or sections – in choreographer Tra Mi Dinh’s latest work, but only the first of them is unambiguously successful. I would happily have watched this strange, lustrous gambit for the full hour, either extended or simply repeated.
Two dancers emerge from billowing clouds of smoke, like figures in a dream, amid an eerie tintinnabulation. Delicate unison stepping gives their progress toward the audience an insect-like grace; raised arms and joined hands further heighten their otherworldly appearance.
The awkward position of the arms, which restricts the movement of the upper body, creates a sense of fragility and risk. It’s as if their grip on one another is all that prevents them tumbling back in the cloud of smoke. It gives the whole scene a shimmery, slippery sort of ephemerality.
After the first dance, the movement becomes more eclectic. Smooth isolations, with their tensing and releasing, give way to looser spinning figures. Vaguely balletic poses contrast with thrusting modern dance gestures. And everything whirls together in the smoke.
The combinations are not always compelling, but something of the mysterious atmosphere of the first section persists. And interesting details register throughout, particularly in the way the seven dancers move between pairs and trios, with new arrangement materialising in the gloom.
This show is based on a shorter commission for Lucy Guerin’s Pieces in 2024, and it retains the same production team, including lighting designer Rachel Rui Qian Lee and costume designer Geoffrey Watson, who provides beautiful filmy smocks.
Tilman Robinson’s score feels a little too insistent. The opening section with its bells has an attractive alienness, but I think the heavier beats used thereafter impose too much on the choreography and a more ambient soundscape might have been more effective.
The work is apparently based on the significance of the number seven across religions and cultural traditions. Yet it is strongest when there is no theme: just fleeting relations between bodies – repetitions and doublings, divergences and singularities – in a world before number settles into meaning.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann
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