“There’s a whole world in that dance.” In a world full of significance and beauty also exists insignificance, meaningless and terror.
Oona Doherty’s Navy Blue explores the insignificance of dance, life and the whole world. From the offset, Navy Blue might seem like a bit of a bleak experience if the point is to comprehend the pointlessness of sitting in a theatre watching a dance show that expresses itself as pointless and irrelevant. However, it is the realisation that because of its own pointlessness, Oona Doherty can truly begin to explore the possibilities available to her without constraint, and it is through the lack of boundaries that Navy Blue finds its beauty.
Navy Blue is split up into three interweaving chapters whose meaning and significance, which initially are blurred, are by the final chapter crystal clear. The show opens with the 12 dancers standing in a line, each donned in matching navy jackets and trousers. This line of uniformity breaks the moment the dancers begin to move: their different heights, the subtle differences between their movements as each dancer is allowed to express their own interpretation of the same move. Yet, they are presented as uniform, in a uniform designed to break down individuality. Is the blue of their suits the representation of the blue collar worker, the elite uniformity of the Navy, or perhaps more evocative of the small blue dots of mankind upon the small blue dot of the earth? Perhaps it doesn’t matter either way.
As the show progresses Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No 2 begins to break down into the drones and swells of Jamie XX’s soundtrack, mirroring the movements and bodies of the dancers. In unison with the clang of a gunshot, dancers drop in a pool of blue light, a sequence that ends with three final frantic dancers, driven by fear they move to save themselves, but to no avail.
In the final act, the dancers return back to the original line of act one, and Oona begins to speak to the audience through voice over. Here she laments on the insignificance of her life and work, which quickly spreads into the meaninglessness of life itself. As she talks, the dancers begin to mirror her words. Movements that once had shape swiftly transition into randomness, grotesque lurches and failing arms. The insignificance does not stop here however, any and all symbolism within the show is unceremoniously flung from the stage. Navy shirts are discarded, dancers begin to drift away from the established playing space, either vanishing entirely or moving deeply upstage. Within this chaos there is beauty. The story of the individual, the search for a unified meaning to begin again, and intricacy and movements of the human body. Navy Blue is perhaps irrelevant, but that doesn’t detract from its beauty.
In the end it is up to you, the audience, to decide where you find meaning, if indeed there is any meaning at all. Here lies the brilliance of Navy Blue, when everything is insignificant everything can have a meaning, so the show becomes what you want it to be.
