Dance Electric

"Those who don’t know how to choreograph put a lot of film and video in their work." Why? "To cover up their artistic limitations." Damning words, these, from the mouth of a leading British dance presenter when asked some years ago to cite current trends in contemporary dance. 

Now, as technology continues to make ever deeper inroads into our lives, it might be worth considering how much circumstances have changed, if at all, in the arts. Is dance in particular—or, maybe better to say, movement-based work—increasingly dependent on the artificial manipulations and potential enhancements that technology offers? And could the effect be liberating, even profound?

Two shows heading to Edinburgh provide clues. Toujours et Près de Moi (translation: ‘Always and Close to Me’), by the London-based company Erratica, plays all month on the Fringe at Assembly Roxy. Cold Blood, meanwhile, is a Belgian production presented for a few days at the International Festival. Both come garlanded with praise and/or promise. And each, in its imaginative and rigorous way, puts paid to the notion of technology as a cold, clinical envelope in which emotions and meaning are lazily sealed. 

Founded a decade or so ago by the Canadian director Patrick Eakin Young, Erratica makes work that’s hard to categorise. Think of it as interdisciplinary music-theatre or, to quote from the company website, "performances and installations, centred on the human voice". The company’s original name was, in fact, Opera Erratica – at least until that first word became too confining. Tellingly, Toujours has been registered under Dance, Physical Theatre and Circus, rather than Music or Musicals and Opera. 

Although Young makes no claims as a choreographer, he concedes that Toujours is intricately choreographed. "It’s all music and movement," he says.  

The wordless performance is underscored by recordings of five unaccompanied classical singers performing Renaissance madrigals as well as contemporary work. What’s special about the show’s movement is that it’s supplied by humans and holograms. Of the show’s four performers, only two are flesh and blood. The other pair—usually miniaturised, but occasionally reduced to body parts (a head, a limb)—is projected onto, or sometimes into, prop boxes moved about by the live actors upon the tabletop set. The effect is odd and beguiling, a treat of visual trickery basically accomplished with mirrors thanks to a Victorian music-hall illusion called 'Pepper’s ghost'.

For Young, however, Toujours is much more than playing with cool—and admittedly vintage—toys. Here technology is at the service of storytelling. The tale that unfolds focuses on a man and woman—the live actors—whose interactions with their younger selves—the holograms—underline how haunted they are by some unidentified, unresolved past trauma. As Young sees it, the characters "dance, cavort, love, bleed, hug, fight". That is to say, they exhibit all the signs of being in a relationship charged with feelings. 

Something to keep in mind: the original title was Ghost Piece. No wonder Young deems his show a "precise, poignant and fun" intimation of "the things that refuse to leave us". 

And what of the chillingly (but deceptively) titled Cold Blood? It’s a sort of sequel to Kiss & Cry, a surreal, sensitive and altogether absorbing 90-minute spectacle that since its 2012 premiere has racked up something like 300 performances worldwide. Both of these ingenious, multi-layered and collectively devised productions were co-directed by Jaco Van Dormael, a film-maker whose credits include Toto the Hero (1991) and The Brand New Testament (2015), and the choreographer Michèle Anne De Mey – also a long-time couple offstage. 

Like its predecessor, Cold Blood is a piece of "live cinema" with a marvellously photogenic catch: the human hand is the star (or, as De Mey puts it, "the main character") of the show. It’s the hand or, more accurately, several hands that, in tandem with the camera, also do most of the communicating, supplemented by poetic spoken text, in English. The familiar five-fingered appendage is used as a functional tool and, more significantly, a hugely expressive instrument.

It’s our privilege and pleasure to witness these hands travelling through a series of beautifully and cleverly constructed small-scale settings and situations that play literally and figuratively with size, and emotionally with time. Set to a soundtrack embracing Gorecki, Ravel and Schubert alongside David Bowie, Janis Joplin and Nina Simone, and loosely pinned to themes of life, death and memory, the result is a gorgeous essay in imagery and motion – or an act of collective dreaming into which the audience is cordially invited.

"Everybody onstage is playing with cinema," adds De Mey. "The fabrication of the movie is what the audience sees." She thinks for a beat, then corrects herself: "Everything is there for you to see!" Her fellow choreographer and performer Gregory Grosjean sums it up neatly when he says, "We create a whole world with little things, and put big meaning into little things." Luckily for us, knowing how these talented theatrical magicians achieve their tricks in no way diminishes the magic.