This staggering look into youth and trauma is an ice-bath for the senses.
‘Chills’. The lifeblood of live performance, the moment where form and meaning click into place and (quite literally) send shivers down your spine. This usually happens once or twice in a good bit of theatre. In BLKDOG, it’s constant.
BLKDOG is a blend of hip-hop dance and freeform movement, choregraphed by Botis Seva in collaboration with Far From The Norm. Seva gives us very little clear narrative, verbal or physical, and so the production feels more like an experience in sensory world-building.
What is immediate from the outset is that this is a show about youth and trauma. The company alternate between infancy and teenagehood, dodging the brutally industrial soundscape (Torben Lars Sylvest) that is essentially gunfire is some parts – the parallels with the war in Ukraine become more apparent as the show goes on and you see young people trying to thrive in a world that crumbles around them.
The synchronisation is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. As these seven dancers become one living, breathing organism, every move they make together – from the minute to the massive, the rigid to the fluid – looks as if you’re watching clones. It’s visually stunning, and makes it all the more impactful when they do break from each other, often with devastating consequences
The dancers’ movements feel caged and suppressed for the first half-hour, aided by Tom Visser’s lighting design. It’s a frantic monochrome nightmare, apart from a lighting rig above that occasionally beams yellow onto the performers, embalming them in golden haze as if they were Greek statues. This constraint continues until about the halfway point, where we get one of the piece’s only verbal cues: a voice booms ‘give the people what they want’. The visceral, sexual explosion that follows feels like a hot shower, pure catharsis – feral.
In parallel with the show’s title, there’s also an animalistic element to the show. At times, the dancers will morph into beasts and prowl, scuttle, waddle and bound across the stage. Not only is it visually engaging but, when combined with war motifs and moments of violence throughout, is also a powerful reference to the dehumanisation of civilians during wartime.
If you’re looking for a show with a traditional narrative, this isn’t it. You might not even walk out of the theatre with any kind of story in your head – I didn’t. What I did walk out with was distinct empathy for our Ukrainian counterparts. Those young people who should be going out clubbing, playing 5-a-side on the weekend, filling out uni applications, laughing, dancing, trying, failing, creating, living. But can’t. We’re very lucky to have the freedoms that we do as young people in Britain. And we’re very lucky to have this production.