Choreographer
Wayne McGregor
Lighting
Lucy Carter
Music
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Nemesis
Random Dance Company
Sadler's Wells
1 - 2 Mar 2002
Wayne McGregor's imaginative vocabulary of movement for this energetic, crackling, highly original performance is drawn from break-dance, robotic mechanical movement, and classical steps, evolving seamlessly into and out of each other in a stunning flow of interactions. The dancers in this company are wonderfully talented and remarkably fit – the dance lasts nearly an hour and a half, without a break; it cannot have one because it is too organic a whole, and anyway the audience never wants it to stop.
Distinctive of this production is the framing of movement on stage by the sound and film surrounding it, both specially devised alongside the choreography to provide structure and comment. McGregor invents in several dimensions, making dance include more than the flight of the dancers; here he invokes an elaborate play of accompanying images and sounds, giving extra scaffolding to the whole.
Interestingly, "Nemesis" is not about emotion – or at least, the prevailing emotion is monotonic, and bright. It drives relentlessly and artfully onwards, as if the company had to finish a task of weaving an extremely complex magical pattern in a given time, and had to use all their skill, grace and strength to beat the clock. Yet the impression is not one of haste or breathlessness, but of unremitting endeavour. Part of its texture is given by striking details, like the complementary black and yellow costumes early on, and the highly imaginative steel arm-extensions later, which became an essential part of the dance's symmetry and play.
If one needed persuading that contemporary dance is at the leading edge of current art, that it is both inspired and inspirational, and that it rests on an enormous amount of talent in the dancers now at work, "Nemesis" would do the job conclusively. And one of the most exciting things it further proves is that there is an abundance of marvellous choreographers, in the present dance world, Wayne McGregor far from least among them.
AC Grayling
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