Artistic Director: Cheng Tsung-Lung
Company: Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan
Music: Sigur Rós
Many looking up into the English night sky last Saturday will have seen the moon surrounded by a mysterious ring of light. This phenomenon, caused somehow by ice crystals in the atmosphere, is known as a lunar halo and provides the title and inspiration for Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan’s spectral, unsettling spectacle. where, against a stark spotlit stage, human bodies flop around like meat sacks in their first stage of animation.
The cold mystery of moonlight pervades the piece, as does the influence of the country where artistic director Cheng Tsung-Lung first observed the halo. Icelandic group Sigur Rós, provide tectonic cadences which are glacial, pounding, inclement; a primordial chaos out of which the dancers emerge. They start as a mass of bodies linked together as one, their limbs jutting like the vertebrae of a terrible beast in the process of being birthed. The fluidity of movement they create together is astounding. We are given the singular experience of observing beings, who are surely real people with hearts and minds, become a new hellish abomination made from the mere constituent parts of those humans.
Where you expect to find sensuality and emotional connection between the dancers, they instead fling their limbs with cold aggression. Divided into heterogeneous pairs,they are perfectly in sync rhythmically but there’s something missing. Their awkward entwinings are impressive in their complete dearth of eroticism, all the more striking given the fact that they are all nearly nude for the most part.
On-stage projections provide coded messages from a technological god. Multiplied crowds of the naked dancers dehumanise them fully. They are merely taut sinew, ribs, nipples, bulging eyes. A colossal man descends, his presence a simple, commanding ideal. A train of dancers sidles towards him, seemingly tender and yearning for a brief moment, before he ossifies into a statue then – ascending to the true height of modern human achievement – he becomes a cartoon, a meme.
The beauty of the whole pageant is of course that these flailing, soulless automata trying to live the Pinocchio dream leave you feeling the emotions they lack even more strongly. When the music shifts to the kind of hopeful, panoramic climaxes most idiomatic of the work of Sigur Rós, the juxtaposition with the uncanny zombie-like dancers is heartbreaking. It’s incredibly moving, and it’s also the kind of art that leaves you feeling very strange afterwards, sharply aware of your, somehow far from inert, flesh and bone.
Runs until 2 December 2023
The Reviews Hub Score
Spectral, unsettling spectacle
