Cholmondeleys and the Featherstone haughs

Nothing is quite as it seems in Lea Anderson's new, Bauhaus-influenced, 1920s Berlin cabaret-inspired show for her two celebrated…

Nothing is quite as it seems in Lea Anderson's new, Bauhaus-influenced, 1920s Berlin cabaret-inspired show for her two celebrated dance companies. Boys could be girls and girls could be boys - and often are. Red, black and the occasional dash of far from-virginal white are the predominant colours of this louche, unsettling, relentless dance of death, brilliantly costumed by Shakespeare in Love designer Sandy Powell. It is orchestrated by the wailing saxophone and pounding keyboards of The Victims of Death, their haunting eastern European melodies and throbbing rhythms urging on the string of prophetic visual images before us.

On and on and on go the dancers, one moment folding themselves into writhing heaps of white-faced, black-hooded, hollow-eyed bodies, the next coming on strong as seductive, Dietrich-wigged blackamoors; white-tied vampires explode into out-of-control marionettes; ugly, live sex show couplings give way to grim-faced waltzes. Behind the spotlights and the glamour, one catches glimpses of the dancers in their seedy, cramped backstage dressing room, hastily changing costumes and shoes, their breathless, artificial lives warmed only by a few single-bar electric fires.

Anderson spares her audiences no time for breath or reflection and offers no ray of hope or beauty in this carnival of the grotesque. It is not an entirely easy watch, but its 75-minutes fly by, and one cannot but marvel at the versatility, fluency and stamina of the 10 superb dancers.

Jane Coyle

Jane Coyle is a contributor to The Irish Times specialising in culture