An energetic and well-danced piece that feels it’s missing something
Augmented is a collaboration between Rambert School, The Juilliard School and Studio Wayne McGregor, the culmination of a year of the three working together.
Danced to rib-rattling electronic music made live by DJ Yraki, it is a wonderfully energetic piece filled with ideas that appear and dissolve into one another; groups form and fade; styles are blended together. There is a huge amount happening on stage. It’s an exciting watch and hugely impressive. As you’d expect from such prestigious institutions, the dancers are technically brilliant — these are the people who will shape the future of contemporary dance.
Where Augmented is at its best is when large groups work together. Like cells subdividing, these groups spawn new ones with new variations of movement. The effect is like a ripple across water. The piece has a very effective way of keeping the audience’s eye moving between bodies on stage — moments of symmetry seem to rhyme; moments of conflict flare and resolve. These things appear naturally and spontaneously, as much a construction of where the audience places their attention as of any rigid choreography. In that sense Augmented uses the audience’s imagination in a clever and often moving way.
The closest thing to a throughline is what might be thought of as pauses or glitches. The music often layers in static and distortion, and these elements are absorbed into the dance. Dancers freeze in improbable positions or gain a sudden angularity in their motion. As the title suggests, this is a piece interested in the digital, the uncanny, and the unsteady. Augmented builds ideas — or quotes them from other dance forms — and then deconstructs them. For a while, that deconstruction is interesting, even beautiful. After a while, one starts to wonder what Augmented is actually saying. It deconstructs so thoroughly that it ends up deconstructing itself into oblivion, losing all legibility. Are we supposed to feel that the body is being fused with the digital? Should that worry us? Is dance immune to that? These questions are never really explored. Augmented cycles around itself without ever daring to interrogate its chosen subject. It becomes a matter of taste, but for me the centre cannot hold. It is possible for dance not to need to have a subject but this is not that, it has chosen to have one but finds itself unable to explore it properly. I lost a clear sense of what Augmented is — what its deconstructions reveal.
In the end it feels a little lost. It’s exciting and fun, but the longer I watched the more I felt something was missing — that the choreography could have been shuffled any which way without changing what the piece is. That feeling is what I’m left struggling with. If we believe that dance is as — if not more — communicative than any other medium, it’s a shame to watch work with so much talent from such brilliant companies that nonetheless feels so illegible.
Augmented’s run finishes tonight at Sadler’s East. Tickets here.