Words by Georgia Howlett.
U N S I L E N C E D by Rieckhof-Silva Collective
Sound travels to us from a distance, as if we are in a cave. Choreographer and performer Moyra Ceclia Silva Rodríguez, one half of Rieckhof-Silva Collective, is a black hooded figure made visible at first by the shell-like butter beans and rainbow ribbons on her wrists and calves. Cautious yet expansive, she explores the space. Like a bird keen to take flight her chest and arms are widespread and yet her legs remain rooted; later, they buckle under an invisible heavy weight.
Civil unrest and protest in Peru, an experience of the collective, is evoked by a solo dancer through her gentle participatory offer to the audience; strings of butter beans draped over our chairs. People shake themnervously at first, but soon learn to respond when her call comes, a soft crackling in time with the beans on her body. A cloaked violinist appears to conjure Rodríguez’s voice, albeit trapped in silent screams, but memory quakes and murmurs of song emerge like slivers of light in the dark. The rhythm of stamping is off kilter with escalating strings and audience involvement is fleeting, somewhat disjointed, but this story of resistance and reclamation is yet unfinished.
Algorithm by Company Sixth
If anyone can restore the ‘dab’ to its former status, even if just for one night, it might just be Company Sixth. The dance move is just one of several cliché yet viral pop culture moments that landmark Algorithm.
Tight and heavily stylised unison filled with gestural quips rev up the energy. With a therapeutic voiceover, self-affirmations veer into a dangerous – but hilarious – ego trip as the cast ‘floss’ with mediative ferocity. The moment, enjoyed by many, is discarded as swiftly as ourfickle attentions. In fact, an extended ending to this piece succeeds precisely because each key moment beforehand has not been indulged. An influencer ring light is held above one dancer who flaunts their feet in a slow sock strip tease. The rest of the cast sit utterly fixated, while audience are engrossed by their engrossment as if in a doom scroll. So enamoured arethe cast that they miss the house lights rising, our applause, and remain this way while people exit; aclever way to end a piece without really ending it. The audience are rendered irrelevant as spectators while up until this moment, the piece demanded our attention, reflecting the short life span of our often ridiculous digital infatuations.
Even if the humour is Gen Z heavy, Algorithm is sublimely paced and masks its sinister undertones just enough for the audience to laugh through what isactually a very tragic aspect of society today.
METANOIA by Chiara Martina Halter and Oliver Walton
Much to her neighbour’s surprise, Chiara Martina Halter is sat in the front row. As she takes the stage and seductively peels of her office wear, Oliver Walton, also onstage, films it. Soundscape is non-descript but ominous as generative AI projects Halter onto the back screen. As her physical body contorts into knots and ripples snakelike out of them, her AI double does an unsettling dance of its own. The figure on the screen morphs Halters shape into tentacles, dolls, vacant goldfaces and cream spinal bones.
When the camera is turned on us, the gormless and melting audience, we watch ourselves being watched. By taking the camera, Halter refutes any theory we might have about her lack of agency, but to be faced with our own voyeurism of this slippery encounter between AI and a real life body, and our place within it,is disturbing. Halter re-dresses, sealing the many mutations we just witnessed in the space, and stalks offstage. METANOIA ends as if what just happened was imagined, or, like society’s integration of frightfully capable technology, perfectly normal.
Header image by Ty Burrows.