Body Of Work

31 March 2015 | 9:12 pm | Paul Ransom

"At once bittersweet and bizarre, it does what dance does best: leaves you in a swoon."

There is a palpable air of expectation in the packed foyer before the show. The word has obviously got out. Last year’s Keir Award-winning choreographer is the new belle du jour. You can almost bank on a letdown. 

But no, for Body Of Work is a triumph of surreal and vulnerable beauty. Textured, unsettling and at times borderline grotesque, it reaches out beyond its intellectual framework and gives us something genuinely affecting. It is, by a mile, the best work thus far in this year’s Dance Massive programme.

If we were being harsh, we could say that Atlanta Eke relies too heavily on the video wizardry of Hana Miller and Jacob Perkins to produce the haunting, Lynch-like strangeness of the work. We might even suggest that much of the piece’s emotional power comes from Daniel Jenatsch’s brooding accompaniment. However, that would be to unfairly discount Eke’s brutal and unrelenting creativity and to ignore the gutsy brittleness she so openly displays.

For all of its sci-fi strangeness, Body Of Work is, above all else, brave enough to be beautiful. It is a trance of broken beseeching. As though someone were reaching out for an anchor point in a universe entirely composed of shifting, ambiguous realities. At once bittersweet and bizarre, it does what dance does best: leaves you in a swoon.