Dancing Under Glass at Hackney Showroom

What happens to dance when one of its key dimensions is removed? And how do we look at the body differently when we can clearly perceive there are movements prohibited by the physical confines of the performance space? 

These are the two questions uppermost in my mind after watching this promenade performance of Under Glass. The audience’s attention is directed to different areas of the performance space by light, with excellent lighting design by Hansjörg Schmidt. Box by box, we are shown seven separate performances in seven separate boxes. A body reminiscent of an embryo, contorting in a giant jam jar. An office worker trapped behind a desk, trying to complete the basic tasks of his working life while never able to stretch to his extremities. A sleeping couple performing the nightly dance of their relationship, trapped in their own skin while their lover remains unknowable. These are recognisably human situations, threads of narrative we can all pick up and weave ourselves a story with, most often casting ourselves as the main characters.

Although they have no obvious relationship to each other, I couldn’t help but try to weave narrative from these separate strands, my mind whirring to tease out a story and invent links and relationships between the pieces. This is how a human mind works, always trying to find a connection between things that may be disparate, maybe not. We don’t always know which bits of information our senses detect are discrete or linked until they have been proven otherwise.

The constriction of space puts Under Glass in the company of other works of art that have been created in conditions of lack or constriction, like Georges Perec’s novel La Disparation, written entirely without the letter e, or the artists of the Italian Renaissance who could only paint that which their rich patrons dictated. Because the physical space, surely dance’s most important requirement, is so limited, the smallest of gestures become the dance. The flicker of a finger, the delicate arch of a back, the spread of a footprint against the glass; these are the movements an audience anticipates. It presents an interesting reversal of the usual attitude of a dance goer.Normally, a member of a dance audience watches dancers perform extreme feats with their bodies, and the thrill is almost a gymnastic one, a delight in seeing human bodies achieve something the spectator’s own body (usually) cannot. However, here the situation is almost the other way around. The spectator has more physical freedom and facility than the dancers, making me really focus in on the fragments of movement that made up the dance much more than I might have if I had been faced with huge leaps and dizzying turns.

Spoken by a performer over Paul Clark’s atmospheric and narrative driven music, Alice Oswald’s specially written poem, Village, adds another dimension to the unfolding human drama. The slightly sinister, almost forensic observations of the poet mirrors the way the audience observes the dancers so closely, trying to make meaning from their smallest gestures like a neighbour spying on the activities of her community.

The words contribute to a scientific quality in the work, the way we might look at animals in a zoo, although it’s also true that all theatre has this aspect. The observation space is traditionally marked out by the proscenium arch, forming the frame of an invisible fourth wall that separates fact from fiction, reality from fantasy, audience from performer. To take dance, usually associated with this other observation box, and place it in a different type of box that has cultural connotations of science, experiment and technology blurs the lines between art and science in a way that we are becoming more and more used to in our world.

This dance work, like the works of similarly genre testing theatre companies like Punchdrunk and Complicité, challenges our ideas of dance and theatre, making the experience of watching a performance both more intimate and more universal. This is performance coming away from the seated amphitheatre model of theatre handed to Western civilisation two and a half millenia ago by Athenians and making it more immersive. In a world where we don’t just expect to read the news, but also comment on it, have our say and share our opinion with the world. We are all makers now, all artists. Or we all expect to be invited to become so.