In Shadowland, Pilobolus create a vast and varied imaginative landscape, through which we follow a young girl on the brink of growing up. On a rare visit to London, this American dance theatre group stunned audiences at the Peacock Theatre on their opening nights earlier this week.
Sporting the head of a dog, a young girl runs away from the circus, falls in love with a centaur and befriends all kinds of weird and wonderful creatures (human, animal and vegetable), both on land and under the sea, on her journey to a castle inhabited by dogs, where she’s magically transformed back to her original form before she returns home. This utterly unique rite of passage story is told through an equally unique visual framework: the world of shadows. The dancers become lifesize, animate shadow-puppets (and puppeteers), and almost all props are created by their bodies too.
In front-of-screen scenes, Dog girl (Lauren Yalango) tumbles through the air, fluidly thrown, caught, rocked and swung by other company members. Yalango is handled like a huge human puppet - each joint and body part is manipulated by her visible puppeteers. She swims through the air in fleeting transit, her feet barely skimming the floor before she bounces inhumanly high above her fellows’ heads. A huge blue moon with a gigantic yellow-orange sun in its wake crosses the stage above her sleeping body – still in full view – before she’s prodded awake by an ominous, large shadowy hand. In a somewhat menacing moment, this inexplicable higher being transforms her into a sitting, licking, ear-twitching obedient dog, yet, thinking better of it, gives her back her body and leaves her with the dog’s head. In a merging of worlds, dog girl slept in front-of-screen reality, yet wakes in shadowland, where she ventures on (albeit with an unfamiliar face) to build relationships with a phantasmagoria of colourful creatures in this ephemeral world.
Putting a screen at the centre of a proscenium arch stage might seem like a distancing device – taking the characters further away from the audience – but Pilobolus manage to do precisely the opposite. If anything, the characters are more vivid (they’re certainly larger than life, literally) when they are behind the screen, rather than in front of it. We’re eased gently and dynamically into shadowland, given the time beforehand for a proper introduction to our focal character – facial expressions and all – so that we feel we know her even after she becomes “a hole in light.”