HIDE | STAGE REVIEW
Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Sat 25 Jan
The fashion, these days, is to call a spade a spade. In another time, this show might have been titled ‘the Nakedness of Being’ or ‘Consciousness and Connection: A Work in Parts’, or something even more rarefied than that. As it is, it is called Hide. And it is about hiding. Nuff said.
The unhidden title of Hide is itself imbued with meaning, for this is a piece which explores the concept of honesty to its core – the exposure of the self, the desire to hide, to meld into the background, to drape oneself in disguise, to camouflage, and so on. The front/facade of physical appearance and perceived sexual identity (or even, lack of clearly delineated sexual identity/androgyny) are explored in an extremely visceral and vivid manner, beneath lights that sometimes act like a spot, a singular beam, revealing bodies starkly; and other times merges with others to create softness and shadow, into which bodies may plunge or even dissolve.
At times it seemed to me that ‘hide’ might perhaps relate to the animal skins we so selfishly covet and steal; the image chosen to promote the play on its marketing material does, indeed, resemble some sort of lumbering, four-legged creature (in fact, it is a dancer draped in a heavy, cowl-like covering). At a time when so many species are on the verge of extinction, this gave an added frisson to proceedings, although I am not sure if this meaning was intended even if, for this reviewer, it was intimated.
In any case, this is a piece that seems more about the psyche than anything else, the physical bodies onstage acting as displays of the human dancers’ inner dichotomies. A soundscape by artist Sion Orgon added to the drama of these inner revelations, jangling and jarring so that we, the audience, tensed our own muscles prior to yet another bodily revelation. I enjoyed this interplay between our own muscles and those of the dancers, the music working on us, in a way, as the light did upon those on stage. It was yet another element employed which managed myriad effect, and it was used precisely, with clear and consummate skill.
In all, then, this was a superb piece of dance theatre: scalpel-sharp, deftly-done, and bold in its imaginative scope. Its brilliance – ‘scuse the pun – a fact we could not hide from.
words Mab Jones