The ominously titled UNDANCE is, like Freddy Kreuger, a less than perfectly balanced child of many parents. Turner prize-winning artist Mark Wallinger, Olivier-winning composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and Royal Ballet resident choreographer Wayne McGregor all have their names on the birth certificate but the melange of ideas presented by Wallinger contains seeds that go much further back.
Among the most important are Eadweard Muybridge's 19th-century photographs, which dissected human and animal motion into still images, and the verb list compiled by sculptor Richard Serra in the Sixties to remind himself that actions are the foundation of all art, and by extension all meaning.
The dance unfolds before a grid like the one Muybridge used to analyse his subjects so clinically. There are also pictures of UN compound gates at the sides of the stage, maybe as reminders of the concentration camp mentality inherent in such a project. Muybridge's subjects performed naked, so the 10 dancers from McGregor's Random Dance are dressed in shorts and tops of sticking-plaster pink. During the more simplistic running-jumping-and-throwing moments they look like the inhabitants of a doll's nudist colony.
These H&E excursions are fleeting until the end, when a strobe-lit jog and a massed arm-windmill start to feel programmatic. Turnage's score, too, with its occasional jazzy burlesque, tempts McGregor into broad approximate gestures. But the best of his choreography keeps breaking from the agenda, dissecting actions only so that he can knot their guts together into pulsing chimeras of motion undreamt of in Muybridge's photos or Serra's list.
Each segment of dance is simultaneously projected onto the grid behind the dancers. McGregor even appears to have re-choreographed one segment in reverse, so that the real and projected figures are performing the same dance nose to tail. This is genius, without any need of a Big Idea.
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Undance, Wayne McGregor, Mark-Anthony Turnage & Mark Wallinger
Sadler's Wells
Rosebery Avenue
EC1R 4TN
