Thrillingly energetic

Blush is the sort of
performance that would
normally annoy your pants off,
if it hadn’t bored them off
already. It starts with a man
slumped upstage left, snoring
his head off, oblivious even
when a foxy babe slinks over for
what the Americans call a lewd
act.

Downstage right a woman
writhes about in a manic
fashion. And then a man berates
the audience with questions
such as: “Do you swallow?”

And so it goes on for an
uninterrupted two hours, with
live light-metal music,
combative dancing, nudity,
swearing, so-called poetry, and
an irritating air of metropolitan
naval-gazing.

Most of us would pay money to
avoid this kind of malarkey, but
Blush is far greater than the
sum of its dreary sounding
parts. Created by the Belgium
dance and film-maker Wim
Vandekeybus, it’s like an elegy
to lost love, not lost in the Romeo
and Juliet sense, but in the sense
of losing your emotional way, your moral moorings long since
slipped.

The piece portrays a group of
modern-day partygoers, five men,
five women, their multiple
desires and many betrayals. It’s
set on a bare stage with few
props, from which Vandekeybus
creates a heat haze of theatrical
energy, an emotional and nervous
fervour that matches our own
when we’re desired or betrayed.

The piece builds to a state of
panic, and then releases into the
fantastically cool waters of a
prefilmed swimming sequence
ingeniously projected on to a split
screen (the dancers dive through
the splits with their pre-filmed
selves instantaneously appearing
on celluloid). Blush is too long, too interested in itself, and
occasionally too sentimental, but
it is also thrilling dance-theatre,
with the performers crawling,
falling and fighting their way
through a frantically forlorn
mating game.

In comparison, Cathy Marston’s
two-part piece based on
Shakespeare’s The Tempest was
a model of decorum. At the
Linbury on Friday and Saturday
night, she hinted at Caliban’s
nudity and his confused sexual
attraction for his mother
Sycorax. In a second duet she
gently conveyed the longing
Prospero and Ariel feel on
parting.

The two duets were vividly
played, and a welcome
accompaniment to Thomas Adès’s
new Tempest opera on the main
Opera House stage. Less evocative
was Marston’s abstract piece for
five dancers to Adès’s existing
Asyla score.

This was competent but
anonymous, and seemed little
related to the Tempest theme, a
real gift and the envy of every
young dance-maker in London.