Random Dance Company have marked the occasion of their tenth anniversary with Nemesis, the first piece that Artistic Director Wayne McGregor has created for the company in two years. This ambitious work combines the talents of lighting designer Lucy Carter, photographer and video artist Ravi Deepres and features animatronics from Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop, all set to a soaring, pulsing score by sound creator, Scanner. Multi-layered in narrative as well as media, the overriding theme of the work is that of transformation: from harmony to conflict; from grandeur to decay; from human to extraterrestrial. <P>Against the prosaic backdrops of a deserted hotel foyer, a public lavatory and a sparsely furnished sitting room, the Random dancers appear in twos and threes, seemingly overwhelmed by the bleak emptiness of their surroundings. The eye is drawn to their sleek muscularity as they spiral their limbs in and out of awkward, misshapen configurations, finding fleeting moments of harmonious symmetry, creating beauty out of ugliness. Their actual, live bodies disappear from the space for their projected selves to slowly filter in one after the other, imprisoned within the photographic image of the decaying interior: flattened against peeling walls, slumped into shabby armchairs, sprawled on threadbare carpet. This soporific vision suddenly implodes in a burning roiling mass as the entire company of dancers erupt on to the stage against a wall of fire from which they gradually emerge, Terminator-like, as ten genetically modified mutants brandishing shiny metallic prosthetic limbs. Drab realism and the vulnerability of human flesh are superseded by science fiction as an invincible army of steely beetle-black warriors wield their mechanical arms with the same deftness and assurance they demonstrated with limbs of bone and muscle. <P>In an epilogue of pure contrast the choreographer himself appears, making his pliant, elastic-limbed journey across the stage alone, moving in harmony with the projected image of an animated technicolour tube that snakes and swirls around him. The final image - McGregor’s transformation - is that of a delicate moth-like creature, its fragile wings fluttering tenaciously before turning away and being swallowed by the encompassing darkness. Beautiful.
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