(re)PURPOSE: the MVMNT (Natalie Abbott)

Last week, social media was lit up by fans of Twin Peaks, geeking out over the bizarre visions conjured by infamously avant-garde director David Lynch in the latest instalment of the show's third season. "There's nothing to point to in the history of television that helps describe exactly what this episode attempts," declared The New York Times. And yet, for all its impenetrable strangeness, Lynch's cultural cache was never questioned.

This reveals a common conundrum: the way we value and respond to experimental art is as much about psychology and reputation as it is about expression. And what is true for television is just as pertinent to live performance. Without knowing a piece by, for example, Pina Bausch, is considered a masterpiece, someone might dismiss her extraordinary but often inscrutable storytelling as artsy-fartsy nonsense. Choreographer Natalie Abbott enters into a sparring match with the fraught relationship between reverence and worth in (re)PURPOSE: the MVMNT, a mercurial mix of spoken word, live music and movement. 

This double-hinged dance theatre piece challenges the innate absurdity of the theatrical, while simultaneously corralling its audience's experience through misdirection and faux-reality. From the moment we enter the main auditorium at Dancehouse, remade into a sort of antechamber to the main work, Abbott's secret manipulations quietly condition the audience. Dancers mingle with theatregoers, occasionally breaking into sudden fragments of movement. Random puffs of haze throb with coloured lights as grimy synths pulse through the space. A man, apparently on the phone, babbles about ballet to a mysterious third party. Abbott is also present, a kind of ringmaster gliding past on a hover board, offering matter of fact descriptions to passing punters of grand theatrical spectacles, replete with vast ranks of bodies and ambitious stage effects. There's a question hanging in the air: has the piece started? Should we stop our trivial pre-show activities - checking phones, enjoying a wine, chatting with friends - and acknowledge these frissons of creativity?

Ascending the steps toward the venue's rehearsal attic, drawn in by the ethereal sounds of a Theremin - played with surprising lyricism by electronica virtuoso Miles Brown - we eventually arrive in a sterile white room, a blank canvas of expressive potential. Abbott fills this creative vacuum with a series of bold incursions, largely danced by Abbott and Cheryl Cameron, often totally nude. Lit with striking blocks of colour and scored with monolithic fugs of sound, it offers a narrative conceit played out in reverse - an implosive reaction to an iconic moment of the classical ballet canon, the solo of The Dying Swan.

The lexicon of classical ballet is apparent throughout, but released from the taut discipline that usually underpins this dance form. Gone are the delicate, elegant lines, replaced by wild, impulsive flows, sweeping, spooling, spilling forth. This is a show of audacious and sometimes shocking gestures, that crumble and concertina as Abbott abruptly interjects, breaking the tension with requests for different lighting or other seemingly out of place instructions. But the most fascinating details exist in its margins: the sound of distant talking; a conscious, pointed choice of open or closed-mouth breathing; a figure slumped in a far corner, or casually walking across the stage. Abbott dares us to question what is real and what is artificial, what is planned and what is spontaneous, in much the same way that we allow our emotional selves to believe in the tragic death of someone on stage, while our rational brain understands it isn't so.

The more tradition-minded dance lover may find this piece unreasonably challenging, and there are moments where the push-pull of the intellectual and the aesthetic are out of balance. But by placing one of the most adored artefacts of mainstream ballet at the centre of this highly experimental work, Abbott poses an important cultural question: why do we place a higher value on one piece of art over another, when both explore the same visceral territory?

Dancehouse presents Natalie Abbott's (re)PURPOSE: the MVMNT till 9 Jul.