Article #236178

Shadowy urban terror gives way to airborne exuberance as the festival celebrates its 20th edition with a programme that disturbs and delights

Suited dancers swing around a streetlight in Spanish choreographer Marcos Morau’s Horses but it’s not exactly Singin’ in the Rain. The mood is more like a stray dog has sidled up to that lamp-post and cocked its leg. The lamps multiply on these squalid, mean streets: uprooted, they become giant props for performers to illuminate and edit the action on a vast stage with its wings exposed and no artificial backdrop. A suspicious figure roams the outskirts with a torch; another drives a vehicle back and forth in the distance. One long-necked light snakes down from above like a tendril, its glow deepening the chiaroscuro. Bodies melt and morph. It is as if a film noir has caught fire in the projector, distorting each scene.

Nederlands Dans Theater’s production, at the 20th edition of Holland Dance festival, confounds from its ragged beginnings to the final seconds, when even the curtain is not allowed to fall in peace. Horses starts with the house lights up and a solo with instinctive flinches and hoof-like hands suggesting hunter and hunted before a second dancer arrives nose-first, as if led by scent. The animality briefly evokes NDT’s Figures in Extinction but this is an acutely urban nightmare, with humans’ survival skills put to the test. Suddenly, the auditorium’s doors slam shut and we are plunged into darkness.