Choreographer: Oona Doherty
A collective impression of Britain emerges from Oona Doherty’s collaborative piece formed with the 32 dancers from the National Youth Dance Company (NYDC), a place that is filled with slow-moving change, individualism and resistance but also collective action, absorption and an encompassing identity celebrating all of the voices within. Formed from interviews and choreographed directly to these words, Wall is a technically challenging work that demands great control and commitment from its young dancers.
This 50-minute piece – performed for a single night on the Sadler’s Wells main stage as part of a national tour – begins with four separate groups huddled together in the semi-darkness listening to a narrated poem about Britain that loops through the production and is projected onto a screen. One reading is that the four groups represent the countries that make up the United Kingdom, each cradling their own private and separate requirements but ever so slowly unfolding themselves into a bigger mass of bodies that fills the stage.
Part of the show’s substance is a reliance on interviews with the company and the adults around them, thinking about concepts and experiences of Britain both now and in the recent past. One dad recalls taking his daughter to see The X Factor being filmed but had never been to a concert while others remember sneaking away to join the line at a Beatles concert or seeing Jamiroquai as a support act for The Brand New Heavies. The NYDC members think about feeling separated from Britishness, the challenge of living in a country they were not born in, of not knowing where they fit in but also finding a home in the NYDC.
Although Wall has a score by Mark Leckey, Luca Truffarelli and Shamos (Shane Connolly), it is really these individual testimonies that Doherty’s movement responds to. Dancers single themselves out as they get ready in excitable groups for those nights out discussed by others, forming lines for them to merge in and out of, and demonstrating a sense of being swept up and thrown down continually. One of the most powerful sections is a simple line of dancers rising and falling to the stage at speed. The rhythmic precision of this edges closer and closer to the audience, altering the timing of the action only when they reach the front and evolve into offset patterns and Mexican waves in what is an intense period of dance.
But Doherty’s focus on repetition and slow motion gives Wall a frustrating quality as well, never allowing itself to fully break free of the tight choreographic bounds that Doherty employs, so while Britain may be similarly constrained, there is also vibrancy and energy in the memories and reflections we hear that isn’t reflected in the movement. You long for the NYDC to break free sometimes, to throw that energy into a collective, fast-paced flurry of activity just as the final soloist does. You long to see these 32 dancers facing the audience with a stomping determination because Wall may be about now and the past, yet the NYCD is about the future and you want to know they have plans for it.
It is a piece requiring technical precision and considerable stamina which the National Youth Dance Company delivers brilliantly, but while it may be about ‘the good, the bad, the ugly. The old and new,’ they also need to imagine the ‘next’ because the NDYC is the future of Britain and of dance as well.
Reviewed on 13 July and continues to tour
