Dance: The Story of Stuff
Backlit’s performance as part of The Edge Stamp season has Rosey Feltham at its artistic helm and is a development of Backlit’s previous work The Leaning Tower of Penchant. Hunched over dancers in high heels creep across the stage and link these two works; the former a “tower of indulgence and desire”, the latter a spectacle of goddess-like women addicted, deluded and disgusted by their stuff.
The audience arrive in the performance space, welcomed by an American-accented male voiceover to this, “the most amazing” performance ever to be seen. It’s an ominous sign when the company is telling you how good their performance is before it even begins, but the extreme, Americanised statements reveal a commentary on the greed of Western society, from infomercials to music videos (the latter reinforced by a dance sequence complete with neon-flashing fake boobs and gyrating dancers clad in leopard-skin - the effect of the movement is a little lost however, as the dancers themselves seem unaccustomed to undulating hips and sexual dance presence). The company of eight dancers - all Unitec contemporary dance graduates - glide in to construct the performance space out of toys, computer equipment and household furniture. Live DJ Amin Payne’s bass-heavy music fills the space, threatening to overwhelm the dancers’ performances but also creating a weighty atmosphere of greed and frustration from ambient soundscapes and hard house. A solo dancer enters to frantically dress herself in the many dresses and tops she has dumped in a pile in front of her. This clothing-laden creature manipulates her arms like sock puppets, her face invisible under the layers. The rest of the company return in Ascot-esque gowns and introduce the feminine-power of this performance through a cooking show focused on the low-fat, low-calorie nature of the food being produced and a charade where dance sequences are solved by scientific descriptions of beauty products. The movement itself is disappointing - an easily recognisable, standard vocabulary of phrases – but to the company’s credit these are interspersed seamlessly between the acted scenes and installations, and a riotous scene in which the whole company throw themselves to the floor and fling long limbs in extended lines effectively conveys the feeling of entrapment and frustration with all this stuff. The audience squirmed in order to rid themselves of their ‘stuff’’, involved in this world of want. Stuff concludes with one of the performers closing the lid on a precious box, sealing the idea that this dance-theatrical “spectacular spectacle” is a Pandora’s box of stuff: dance stuff, material stuff, music stuff, consumerist stuff, relationship stuff. Heavy stuff.
VIRGINIA KENNARD