Press
Luke Jennings, The Times 14 March 2010
There’s not much that panics the English sensibility more than the notion of audience participation, but in Disgo by Fleur Darkin – director of the Darkin Ensemble and one of the more overtly theatrical of the new wave British choreographers – we encounter it in curiously alluring form. Led to a darkened stage, we mill around as UV-lit dancers slither among us, hands snaking around our waists or lingering briefly on the backs of our necks. The male and female performers, dressed alike in asymmetrical white tunics, dance as if in trance-states, waves of movement rippling through their bodies. It’s as if we’ve been transported to some nocturnal ritual in ancient Sparta.
Gradually it becomes clear that uncostumed assistants are also moving among us, herding us this way and that before mutely directing us to follow luminous floor-markings. Little by little, audience members are initiated into fragmentary physical routines, a folding of hands followed by a wave, perhaps, and at a given point it ceases to be clear who is in Darkin’s pay and who isn’t, which is of course her intention. The dancers’ inches-away proximity also raises interesting questions of personal space which dissolve to be replaced by questions of reaction. Are we just going to stand there like trees as these muscled forms wrap around us, or are we going to go with the Dionysian flow? Intriguing and weirdly enjoyable stuff, even for the English-born among us.