Director and Choreographer: Adrienne Hart
The advance publicity for Neon Dance’s piece Prehension Blooms makes much of director Adrienne Hart’s collaboration with Bristol Robotics Lab to produce robot creatures to share the stage with dancers Fukiko Takase and Travis Clausen-Knight.
If that prospect inspires thoughts of humanoid or even quadruped machines in the mould of those that feature in Boston Dynamic’s viral videos dancing along, the actual robots may disappoint. Instead, we have largely static creatures residing in small sandpits, static bulbous bodies adorned with skeletal tentacles that move independently, but slowly.
Those movements are undeniably creepy, and one can see how they might enhance the idea that the dance floor is some weird alien desert landscape, even if the actual sand is confined to the smallest of spaces within the polished black floor. But the effect is not dissimilar to that achieved by 1960s sci-fi with puppetry and bits of fishing wire. Sure, these motions are autonomous, but it feels as if the potential for dancers to share a stage with robotics remains untapped.
And so instead, the focus is on the two dancers. Emerging on stage in body-hugging jumpsuits and futuristic trainers with see-through platform heels, Takase and Clausen-Knight already convey a sense of otherworldliness. Whether their characters are futuristic humans or android replicants is uncertain, but that is an intriguing prospect in itself, as if at some point in the far future there may be no difference between man and machine and the question as to whether that matters becomes moot.
As the jumpsuits are discarded and the pair dance in just underwear, the exposure of so much human skin is counterbalanced by choreography that emphasises artificiality. Movements are largely humanistic but with occasional spasms of ineptitude, as if controlled by an AI brain that occasionally makes hugely inappropriate motor control choices. Together with Sebastian Reynolds’s amorphous score, the sense of witnessing beings from elsewhere in space and time begins to take shape, even without the robotic tentacles in the background.
But at other times it feels as if sequences have sprung from exercises which might have worked better in the rehearsal room than in full performance. What would it be like, one passage suggests, to traverse a dance space with one’s head permanently affixed to the floor? And once that’s figured out, what about if one’s partner must maintain as much physical contact as possible while you do so?
Other sections of the piece – which runs for an hour but feels longer – are more successful, especially when the dancers dress in flowing robes. Clausen-Knight in particular conveys a more spiritual tone, as if a priest is communicating with his god. Some of the more inhuman choreography remains, at times suggesting maybe an adoption of faith by an android. But at other times there feels so much disconnect between segments that any attempt to find cohesion or coherence is futile.
That the audience feels a need to find greater meaning in work such as Prehension Blooms is not surprising. What is especially frustrating is that the piece itself seems reluctant to have one. When slow, small, ponderous robotic tentacles are the most intriguing parts of a dance piece, one can only feel disappointed.
Reviewed on 15 October and now tours
