without trace
at the Playhouse on Tuesday 14th March 2000

A semi-familiar actor tells us what escape velocity means. Four dancers begin to work through twenty things to do with a balance bar. The two narrators start on an extended piece of poetry/improvisation about wanting to be free, having to get away, or something along those lines. Thankfully, about at this moment, the special effects crash in. VTOL do multimedia dance, and the energetic lighting, projector-house stage, and floor-tearing music are critical. The production lurches up from banal to spectacular, and, for a while, the sight of dancers writhing against massive distorted projections of their own movements is thrilling. However, the rambling narration is not enough to disguise the boring choreography, and the dancing seems scrappy, and occasionally awkward, although this might have been aiming at authenticity. Director Mark Murphy's actual interest -- film, not dance - rapidly takes main stage, literally, as a massive projection screen descends, hiding the dancers. From here on the performance becomes a rather dull short film, with breaks for dance and storytelling. The story (woman vanishes without trace - what then?) had been written though improvisation, leaving over-long scenes, rambling dialogue, and an exaggerated tendency for the characters to share their feelings. The soundtrack was inevitably filmic (often quite identifiably a cross between the soundtracks of Crash and Paris, Texas) but when the beat speeded up the music was easily the most exciting thing on the stage; a barrage of blinding sound along the techno-folk divide, which left the dancers trying to keep up. But though the ideas, music and staging were individually exciting, the narrative which should have given structure was too often intrusive, over-explanatory, and annoying, and instead of involving the viewer instead damaged the story - strangely enough by communicating its ideas just too thoroughly.

Jeremy Dennis