Two Searingly Beautiful Pieces of Dance by Two of the World’s Most Exciting Choreographers
Good dance arrives at beauty; great dance begins with beauty, venturing outward from there to communicate – with oxymoronic complexity and simplicity – the emotions that sit restlessly in our bodies.
So Are We is the first time the work of choreographic duo Sol León and Paul Lightfoot has been performed by a British company. It comprises two contrasting pieces: Shoot the Moon, a dark exploration of fractured relationships, and Salle de Danse, a light and charming piece structured around the parts of a ballet class.
Shoot the Moon takes place in a cavernously empty set of rooms in a house. It revolves to cycle through three rooms, as if the rooms along a corridor had been bent into a circle. Above this, two screens are used to cleave the image of the dancers into multiple angles – daring the mind’s eye to work out where the camera must be. In this surreal geometry, the familiarity of the domestic peels away to reveal something stranger. And in that strangeness, León and Lightfoot develop a movement language that feels entirely new – one that seems to speak to despair and to loneliness. In solos and duets, the dancers move with a precarious jaggedness. León and Lightfoot somehow manage to stage whole domestic lives in a few bars of music – it is danced to Philip Glass’s Tirol Concerto, equally extraordinary. It is as if they are squeezing these relationships into a pure concentrate. It’s thrilling to watch: the kind of dance that has you transfixed for its entirety. Infinitely inventive and deeply moving, Shoot the Moon is the kind of piece that you end up comparing everything else you see to.
Salle de Danse is far lighter. Based on a video work Lightfoot made during the pandemic, but expanded to use almost fifty dancers from across the Royal Ballet, it is a series of short sections titled after parts of a ballet class or performance. Ballet often explores ballet, and often it is narcissistic – forming a closed loop in which the piece is only interested in the artform it is made through. Not here. It is certainly a love letter to ballet, but one also able to find humour in ballet’s quirks.
As in Shoot the Moon, León and Lightfoot’s never-ending choreographic imagination is a joy to watch. They constantly find new ideas, and yet every idea also feels developed. It’s an intricate balancing act that only the best choreographers can pull off.
It is an incredible spectacle to see fifty dancers, often in perfect unison, sharing a stage simultaneously. Work of this scale, rare as it is, often loses its intricacy. It risks becoming like a marching band – impressive as a unified image, but look at one individual and it loses all meaning. León and Lightfoot elegantly avoid this. Even with the stage full, the dance feels alive no matter what scale one finds oneself looking at.
So Are We is dance at its very best. It is beautiful – very beautiful – but not content with being just that. It’s also intelligent, radical, and deeply moving. Everyone who sees it will have a different moment, but you can be sure they will all have at least one that burrows its way deep into their minds, never quite to be forgotten. León and Lightfoot have made something that every audience hopes to see each time they buy a ticket: searingly beautiful, and somehow also so much more.
So Are We: León and Lightfoot runs at the Royal Opera House until 20th June. Tickets here.