Music: Edoardo Robert Elliot
Director: Moreno Solinas & Igor Urzelai Hernando
As the light returns and everything bursts into life again, carnival traditions around the world celebrate the Spring Solstice. While it can sometimes be a tame affair, albeit with hidden meaning (think maypole dancing), we shouldn’t forget that pre-Christian rituals were a unabashed celebration of the flesh. Choreographers Igor x Moreno haven’t forgotten. Together with a group of dancers gathered from across Europe, they have created a deliciously dark and visceral production that draws on Basque and Sardinian traditions, a joyful celebration of all things carnal.
Karrasekare (the Sardinian word for Carnival) is eighty minutes of pure delight, bringing together brilliantly original choreography, gruelling performance and clever design. Full of surprises, the show moves seamlessly from gloomy stillness to chaotic misrule. Opening with a single figure, mournful singing and a good deal of atmospheric smoke, it’s anyone’s guess how things are going to end. Soon, though, there’s animalistic roaring, fearsome costumes, drum rhythms and hypnotic circle dancing. There are moments that seems to recreate raw images from visual art – Paula Rego’s Dog Women, Goya’s child devouring Saturn or Soutine’s meat carcasses. There’s sorrow and revelry, pain and pleasure. There’s lots of bold and beautiful nakedness.
The pulsing soundtrack by Edoardo Robert Elliot is overlayed with live song, yelps, shouts and guttural sounds, rhythmic pounding of feet and sticks. Repetitive and trancey, it brilliantly accompanies the ritualistic and seemingly unstoppable movement.
The company slip effortlessly in and out of costumes (by KASPERSOPHIE) that are brilliantly conceived to be both frightening and funny in equal measure. Backwards looking masks create a disturbing sense of the uncanny, body altering shapes offer sinister silhouettes.
There is a problem, though, which somewhat diminishes this delightful production. Solstice is all about the light and dark, and it seems the lighting design (by Joshie Harriette and re-lit for touring by Laurie Loads) has taken things way too far. Poorly placed white lights shining directly at the audience and little light on the action make seeing much of it difficult and uncomfortable. There are two scenes – one at the beginning of the show, and at the end, where it’s impossible to see what’s going on. In the final scene something happens that must surely be important beneath a huge raincloud, but it’s completely lost in the darkness. In fact, when the lights do finally go down completely, the audience is unsure if it’s actually the end.
It’s a disappointing finale to a delightful and unique show that sits somewhere between dance and performance art and really is the best of both.
Reviewed on 22 May 2024
The Reviews Hub score
brilliantly original, joyful
