Lullaby combines video projection, dance, dramatic action and dark humour. Five performers, including director/choreographer Vardimon, lead us into a multi-layered and thought-provoking insight into illness and hospitalisation.
Opening with a crazed monologue by what appears to be a threefoot-high baseball player in head protection peering through hospital curtains, we're immediately in a state of suspense as to what will happen next. It's a waiting-room scene, a girl within her own world, stereo earphones in. Amidst coughing patients, the man next to her is trying unsuccessfully to embrace her. There's a dancing doctor in surgeon's greens and a mischievous, jerky nursing auxiliary.
Dancing is precise and often illus trative of the dialogue-for example in a wonderful routine between a doc tor and a nurse utilising a pillow on the theme 'Kill the disease without killing the patient; treatment can be more painful than the illness'. Medicine is a battle and a quest for victory over illness.
There's a fantastic percussive routine with a handheld microphone by Hofesh Shechter as a doctor/specialist. Later, Vardimon plays/dances a pneumatic robotic Stepford Wife of a nurse with a pulsating neon heart badge pinned on her chest. There are skilful choreographies with Zimmer frames. Video projection is imaginative and surprising. In one scene, a doctor examines the female patient with a camera concealed next to a lamp on his forehead - the image of what he sees is projected onto a hospital curtain. It's unnerving. There's a beautiful, moving animation of two hearts pulsating, projected onto two dancers' torsos. One heart leaves, travelling down arms to meet the heart of the other, which fills with red. 'Lullaby is beautiful, surprising, compelling Truly theatrical dance theatre.