In the first of three dance pieces by the Californian dance company Zion the audience is invited to cluster around a small raised stage. As mine was an English audience of course there was much embarrassed shuffling ‘not too close’, and the stage manager handling this aspect of our entry had to coax and encourage. As it was, I ended up almost overhanging the platform, and found it a very different experience of dance – being so close that you could reach out and touch, so close that at times you can feel the performer’s breath on your face. It made the whole performance intimate and involving; instead of watching an ensemble of movement at a distance, you find yourself concentrating on one dancer at a time, the detail of their pose and twist, the sliding of muscles beneath the skin. It’s a very different experience to what you see and feel separated from the performance by the normal distance between seats and stage.
The dancers perform within a small space about three metres square, so the dance itself is coiled and confined. With three performers on stage, much of the dance is an intense spiral of activity around the sole prop, a central chair. At the start of the performance the male lead sits on the chair, twitching like a methamphetamine addict, as the snake-like movement suppressed in his body is drawn out by two women dancers who joust and spar with him and each other in a close-up whirl of bodies.
A second piece was shown as a film, for which the audience were ushered to the back of the room to watch two of the dancers hanging and stretching from trapezes. And then finally we sat in seats as the dancers used the whole of the floor at the Lectern. The company used lighting very simply and sparingly, letting the dance speak for itself, although a sleazy cocktail bar vibe was created by drawing back the curtains of the bar at one end of the space, two of the dancers posing languorously on top.
Their music mixes were great – interesting textures and overlays of speech, and a lot of bluesy strong rhythms that suited their dance style very well. There was a nice continuation of the audience contact with a gumshoe woman detective in a raincoat dancing round and leaning on the audience. It was a pleasantly diverse show, though not as Tarantinoesque as it made itself out to be – the strapline that this was a dance company you would not want your mother to see felt a little old-fashioned, and not even that apt in light of the performance. It was a solid piece of dance theatre, though the last piece, while atmospheric and engaging, did feel a little tame. But I liked the sense of connection with the dancers – they were very present in the audience’s consciousness, in a way that a distant stage could not manage. You see the dancer, as well as the dance.