Creators: Requardt & Rosenberg
Future Cargo is a wonderfully weird interpretive dance piece about aliens set inside a 40-foot haulage truck.
The audience are given wireless headphones upon their arrival in the newly renovated Lewis Cubbit Square, just off the trendy Coal Drops Yard. The headphones provide a portal to intimacy with the show in a very public setting, by delivering the ambient and anticipatory sound straight to you personally. For the next 50 minutes a cast of skilled performers, who are unfortunately unable to be singled out as they have their heads and bodies coveredby a skin-tight shining silver morph suit for the entirety of the show ,take a handful of motifs on mundane humanity and play with them over and over until they are more recognisable than you may have thought possible.
Through repetitive and humorous images that circle the truck on a never-ending travelator, the show explores the grass-is-always-greener-isms of UFO hunters. The aliens invite us and the truck driver to join them in an idyllic world that has everything, even your dog. But as the aliens become more and more human (bowling, water coolers, parties, tennis) they become simultaneously more and less appealing. Is there any point if they’re just like us?
The set and costume design by Hannah Clark is pitch perfect; it never does too much or too little, always providing the right backdrop for humour or sincerity. The constantly revolving stage is adaptable and the costumes are a nod to nostalgic ideas of aliens whilst remaining fresh and relevant. Sound design and composition by Ben and Max Ringham are equally clever. It somehow brings a lightness to monotony and the scenes with more traditional music are fun, engaging and well- paced.
Future Cargo is almost flawless. It skilfully bridges the gap between intimate and shared, nostalgic and current, hopeful and dreary. Sometimes the lack of concrete narrative is felt. Especially as some of the more synchronised pieces of movement are not quite as tight as they could be. Running at a tight 50 minutes and showing at a more relaxed time slot of 9pm, it is perhaps a five star study of themes through movement, but a four star fully-fledged show.
Runs until 20 August 2022
The Reviews Hub Score
Out of this world.
