National Dance Company Wales: Frontiers

The Place, London
October 8, 2024

National Dance Company Wales’ fierce double bill, Frontiers, features work by Melanie Lane and artistic director Matthew William Robinson, and affirms the company as a formidable collective of confident, intuitive artists.

Lane’s Skinners is a seriously creepy start. The cast of seven don white capes with colourful outfits printed on the fronts and backs, an imitation of normal dress. Snags of wigs are attached to their heads which themselves are encased in nude stockings, as are hands and arms. In a loose diagonal line they oscillate, slowly swapping places while we ponder with discomfort their translucent faces. To a warbling siren soundscape, they break into vogue-esque shapes and poses.

National Dance Company Wales in Skinners by Melanie Lane
Photo Jorge Lizalde

The piece takes off. Lane’s richly varied, quirky choreography sees the dancers cut crisp gestures, and in the next moment thrust like ragdolls. Their autonomy is further flung into question by the fact they are faceless. Morphing as a group they pack punch, but mini solos are curiously unique to each dancer, a style that obeys the piece’s movement language but betrays hints of personality.

National Dance Company Wales
in Skinners by Melanie Lane
Photo Jorge Lizalde

Skinners becomes stressful. Thrashing movement and racing electronic sounds heighten until, finally, all ceases leaving an odd landscape of delicate interactions. The performers remain slightly stilted but are inquisitive and intimate.

Peeling off the capes and masks, we enter a new environment. Slow burn exploratory contact and legato floorwork, constantly developing as all the dancers progress around the stage, is at first tame but ultimately welcomed.

Now we see their faces, and the touch of skin on skin, it is blatantly clear how much the absence of clear facial features influences our perception of their movement. It is a relief to see bodies in their natural state after the uncanny valley of before.

Indeed, Lane’s work positions itself in the grey area between human bodies and digital, flesh and illusion. Though the two-part structure of Skinners implies an unambiguous distinction, the first half affectingly reflects bodies unsettled somewhere in-between.

August brings equal acceleration and ferocity, this time accompanied by simple white and grey dress suits and a horizontal line of light across the top of the stage. The red light stretches and shrinks.

Robinson’s work balances stunning fluidity, so well mastered by the company, with punchy staccato, best seen in gentle, embracing contact work spliced by sparing but sudden isolations. In flurries of floorwork, the dancers spiral to the ground and back up with strength and swiftness, whirlpools that unravel almost in blurs before the eyes. The images this creates are abstract, but no less impressive.

The line of light, designed by Emma Jones, cleverly divides the stage. It becomes a threshold, or horizon, beyond which the dancers vanish into darkness, before returning to the soft light of the foreground. This elegant effect highlights certain moments, or people, without clumsy stage entrances and exits.

National Dance Company Wales in August by Matthew William Robinson
Photo Jorge Lizalde

Robinson was inspired by sunsets, endings, and goodbyes. Something is running out in the shrinking red light, as bodies shift restlessly or hover in numbed stillness beneath it, but these goodbyes are more urgent than tender. It is not to say the piece is without sentiment. Several phrases are moments stretched and clung onto, such as a duet that entwines two bodies into one as they knowingly touch heads in various configurations. But August,despite its soft name and sensuous red glow, feels like an alarm, a warning, perpetuated by high-stake movement.

The interpretations of either piece matter only up to a point when witnessing the full bodied, generous performance of these dancers. National Dance Company Wales attack movement without undermining its lyricism, striking a balance between power and ease that is truly admirable.

Frontiers by National Dance Company Wales continues on tour to November 20, 2024.