Review: Impasse

Beginning with a voiceover announcing that the performers stand with all oppressed people around the world, including those facing apartheid, Impasse is a celebration of the Black body – rewriting the histories and narratives projected onto it, and rejoicing in it just as a body, too. 

At the outset, it is an exercise in tension and a refusal of vulnerability. One performer, wearing an ornamental costume that at first looks like an inanimate stack of bags, defamiliarises us with the human form – what is dance, what is movement, what is the body, when it is not visible? As Impasse shifts into a two-hander, it continues to ensure we never see the performers’ faces; their backs are turned to us, or they are obscured by darkness or grasping, grieving, angered hands. We hear something like wood splintering, and a performer’s nude body twists, creaks, twitches; sweat shining on a lithe back, muscles taut: a powerful evocation of the difficulties of breaking away from from the ossified burdens of history. 

The poetic irresolution of their movements finally reaches a catharsis, and when the performers finally turn around to face us and each other it is explosive. Here they are, resplendent in the grace of anger, resilience, survival, the beauty and miracle of having a body vibrant and alive. A kinetic, physical ode to the labour and euphoria of reinscribing the body and the space it inhabits as one’s own – and the twinned grief and joy of always belonging to history, as well as the present.