Motionhouse completes Earth Trilogy with Charge

Charge is the final element of Kevin Finnan’s Earth Trilogy, an exploration of ecological and environmental themes; following Scattered (2009) and Broken (2013). The new show premiered at Motionhouse’s home theatre, the Warwick Arts Centre, last autumn and this first London performance is part of the company’s 30th Anniversary celebrations. Where Scattered referenced our relationship with water and Broken concerned the planet, Charge explores the electric energy that makes human bodies work. It continues the Motionhouse dynamic of powerful, acrobatic movement interacting with electrifying digital technology.

Circus-based theatre is on a popular high these days, but it is almost exclusively created by bringing traditional circus arts into a proscenium setting and adding other elements, often including dance. Motionhouse is the ‘almost’ exception, because its shows always begin with strong dance skills and exciting digital imagery before building in the aerial and hand-to-hand acrobatics. 

The six exceptionally busy performers (three men, three women) have all primarily trained in contemporary dance but they have each acquired skills that would suitably equip them as hand-to-hand or aerial artists in any Cirque show; they also have the indefatigable combined sprint and endurance qualities of world-class marathon runners. The group dynamic pays no heed to gender stereotypes: powerful women lift and carry muscular men, with apparent ease. Performing at height, relying on each other's strength and co-ordination, most of the time, requires a close-knit ensemble with complete mutual trust. An apartment-based sequence, performed high above the stage, seemed to have the dancers moving freely, as a group, on the narrowest of platforms, as if partying on a gymnastic balance beam.

In creating the thematic narrative, Finnan worked closely with Professor Frances Ashcroft of Oxford University, author of ‘The Spark of Life’ – about electricity in the human body – and –supported by her expertise – his choreography encompassed many aspects of electric signals within a body, from the obvious (the performers linked together within the digital imagery of a beating heart) to the more obscure (electrical experiments on a frog).  

The setting also flips from the home to where the heart is; from the simplicity of a hanging light bulb to the metaphor of that same electricity switching on the thoughts inside our brains. A permanent – and essential – bespoke ingredient of any Motionhouse work is the clever linkage of human movement and digital images. This found many outlets here but none more impressive than a dancer apparently being dissolved and absorbed into a pulsating organism, created by the fusion of digital technology and material in the set.

If I have a doubt about the show – and it’s being picky – it would be that the onslaught of imagery is sometimes too much of a surge, perhaps over-done in terms of the relentless momentum; and punctuating this action with some quieter – and less challenging - sections to allow for recharging the batteries may have kept the whole ninety minutes a little fresher. As it was, I was mentally shattered, by the end.    

The inter-connectivity of artistic collaboration is key to the theatrical success of Charge (as with the two earlier works in the trilogy) and the main factor behind that is clearly a familiarity crafted from experience. Simon Dorman has been designing the sets (built by Oblique furniture) that are so integral to any Motionhouse show, since the company’s early days; Natasha Chivers has been lighting their shows for over a decade; Logela Multimedia provided holistic digital creativity for the whole ‘earth’ trilogy; and the composing duo of Tim Dickinson and Sophy Smith have now written soundtracks for no less that fifteen Motionhouse productions. Their exciting score for Charge was suitably dynamic, building up waves of pulsating vitality to match the power games on the stage.  

Finnan is clearly comfortable with re-assembling the team that has been successful for him in the past and his faith in these co-collaborators has again been rewarded by a slick and fast-moving production in which it seems that everything (including the human performers) is so finely balanced and so intricately inter-connected that something has to go wrong over 90 minutes of non-stop action. If it does – and I’m sure it must, from time-to-time – in my experience, at least, it never shows. 

As the conceptual ringmaster, Finnan brings a profound sense of theatre and a mastery of multimedia to fuse with dance and circus artistry in a way that gives Motionhouse a distinctive flavour, separating it’s creative brand, in a burgeoning genre, from a crowded market place; a driving force that is given even greater currency through this hi-energy Charge.