Choreographer and Director: Oona Doherty
“Now that I mean nothing, I can do anything”. The meaninglessness of life against the great expanse of space is the subject of Oona Doherty’s superb Navy Blue, a 45-minute dance exploration of insignificance and the personal need for meaning and purpose. Part of the Dance Umbrella Festival and running for only two performances, this complex and energizingly philosophical piece is an unmissable world premiere.
Navy Blue has three related chapters, the interpretation and design of which only become clear in the final act when a spoken monologue overlays the dance, giving shape and insight to the movement we have seen before. But even before this, Doherty’s storytelling is extraordinary, creating two powerfully emotive set pieces that seem to emerge spontaneously from the music to grip the audience.
The first opens with 12 figures in a line, each dressed in the same blue jacket and trousers, a loose-fitting suit. Doherty and Lisa Marie Barry’s costume design feels significant and while these are certainly not the marine uniforms that may have been suggested by the title, these outfits take on multiple resonances as the show unfolds. Do they signify the simple smock of the worker, the unfussy garb of the prisoner or is this simple blue attire redolent of a more existential symbol of the smallness of humankind on the smallness of earth? In a way the answer is yes to all of these interpretations and more.
These opening performances are set to two phrases within Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No 2, a piece with a gorgeous melancholy that Doherty uses to considerable effect. The more upbeat sections support the opening piece, focusing on 12 dancers doing almost the same but distinctly individual movements in sync. They may raise their arms or spin in unison but the way each performer does that is unique. In John Gunning’s full light, they run in big, expansive circles, clutch at one another and balance small creature-like movements as they huddle together, finding power and collective purpose in their unison.
Then, from the softer, heartbreaking tones of Rachmaninoff’s sad, beautiful sound, a story of destruction, fear and pain emerges. Trapped together in an enclosed space a crack shot cuts through the tenderly poignant strings felling one of the dancers. As the rest try to protect one another, they are picked off one by one initially perhaps for failing to perform their task, but later it seems merely for the amusement of the unseen assassin. This is a hugely meaningful section of Navy Blue, one that devastates as the final three try to protect one another, offering themselves as a sacrifice to save their fellows.
Doherty brings this all together in a final, slightly less emotionally satisfying but more futuristic piece applying a rumbling, electronic soundscape in which the dancers return to their original line while a pre-recorded voice draws us into a contemplation of their insignificance that creates a meta reflection on the existence of this dance itself. “What is the point, who is it for and what will it do?” the voice asks as it labels its own existence as an “inessential story”.
But Doherty draws her strands together well, the topical references to a Fight Club-inspired consumerism are a little blunted but this speech also explores the bloodied history of humanity as represented in every individual, finding freedom of expression in that very recognition of being everything and nothing simultaneously Navy Blue is a short piece but one with big questions about the meaning of everything and where we all go from here?
Runs until 22 October 2022
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Big questions
