AN ANATOMIE IN FOUR QUARTERS | STAGE REVIEW
Welsh Millennium Centre, Cardiff Bay, Fri 29 Nov
We began on the fifth floor. Wheezing my way to the top of the WMC – so high up, I wondered if I might touch the roof – audience members were directed to a few select rows of seating. Our view of the stage, from this great height, was something like a scientist looking at cells through a microscope. Below us, dancers flexed and frolicked, ran and rolled about, grouping and separating and joining other groups in a fury of frenetic movement. It made me think of a city scene, and the music that played – a curious piece that sounded like a mix of a Bollywood dance track and Cotton Eye Joe – reinforced this sense of the frantic, the fast-paced, the physical.
From this point followed so many amazing and startling moments in Clod Ensemble’s production that there are far too many to mention here. Particularly powerful for me was the moment we entered into the seating area for the second quarter, to be met with a pale, pallid woman lying upon a pallet, as if she were a corpse awaiting dissection – eyes closed, nearly naked, but singing the most powerful and soulful aria you can imagine. I was also fascinated by the links made between dance and other elements: as an example, we were shown a giant filmic image of an x-ray’d neck, bending and re-bending. The dance then was set to music which included the voice of an auctioneer, which brought to mind the image of people bidding – by bending and re-bending their own necks. Many pieces of the performance drew these links, and made me think of the body in various ways – as bones, cells, as a house, in terms of emotions, and more.
There even seemed to be a sort of love/loss story threaded into the show’s rich, vein-like interweaving. I wasn’t sure that this entirely worked for me, the lyricism was perhaps a little too earnest for my personal poetic tastes (I am a comic poet, after all) but, in terms of the show as a whole, it was an intriguing addition.
Successive sections of the show led us to lower tiers of the theatre and, finally, onto the stage itself, where we were encouraged to walk amongst the moving dancers and take a look at their movements and physiques. I liked that so many shapes of body had been chosen for the performance, including a woman with a more curvaceous body and large breasts. This was heartening. The show then concluded with us seated at the back of the stage, the dancers beyond the curtain ahead of us… To see the theatre so vast, empty, and yet fully lit was a truly magical, and marvellously surreal, moment.
A wonderful end to the Sadler’s Wells commissioned piece which, with its myriad musical components, superb styles of movement, and intriguing examination of the bodies we inhabit, was extremely impressive, if not awe-inspiring.
words Mab Jones