Tom Dale Company in Surge and Sub:Version

The Place, London
March 21, 2023

The Tom Dale Company delivers a super satisfying evening of dance at The Place. State-of-the-art lighting turns the black box theatre into a fantasy world of boundless space and brilliant colour. Add dance to feed your soul, music to spice the mix, then sit back and enjoy.

Surge, a marathon solo performance, made this Jemima Brown’s evening. It is a multi-media collaboration between Brown, choreographer Tom Dale and Barret Hodgson who devised the stunning digital design. To complete the creative line-up there was original music from Ital Tek and together they gave a platform for Brown’s phenomenal talent now extending to include vocals.

Wearing an unobtrusive headset mic, Brown explores her vocal range first in a ballad with feet planted, her upper body gyrating in robotic moves. Later, and most interestingly, in a climactic moment, as the stage becomes a moving mosaic of lights radiating in concentric circles, the sound is distorted to match her voice that comes in staccato bursts matching the strobe lighting. It’s an ingenious combination used to stunning effect.

Jemima Brown in Tom Dale’s Surge
Photo Alice Underwood

There are moments when searing lighting creates that heady sensation, similar to virtual reality, where gravity is defied in a sea-green heaven. Brown wears simple white shorts and sports top with stylish make-up to complete the other worldly look. It provides the canvas for a play of multi-coloured lights in some of the more dramatic sequences where dance features. Here she rolls and tumbles with athletic skill, holding the audience in the palm of her hand, self-contained and drawing us in like a magnet: a tour de force from an amazing performer.

Sub:Version is a celebration of dance; dance that moves like a force of nature. The work is built on a framework of ten sections of vibrant and varied electronic dance music by WEN.

Dale, collaborating with four exceptional performers, Brown with Dan Baines, Tom O’Gorman and Meghan Stevens, is inspired to choreograph dance of amazing fluidity where powerful agile bodies move with inherent grace. Andrew Ellis’s lighting is sharp and neatly tailored to the work. Switching focus onto the audience to temporarily daze, it allows dancers to change places and link sequences while the shift in dynamics and new rhythms ring the changes. Brief solos, duets of infinite variety and sequential movement rippling through the quartet make a riveting mix.

Dale states his fascination with the vortex where digital meets dance plus music and visuals, and the double bill achieves this in an evening of total theatre.

Tom Dale Company in Sub:Version
Photo Alice Underwood

Scatter Dance Company, The Place’s adult dance ensemble presented Sync, a short curtain raiser from James Kay. The gentle cohesive choreography was performed with great commitment and obvious pleasure with shared value to the community, the audience and the dancers. It was an excellent idea to give the opportunity and a platform to the group.

Tom Dale Company continues on tour to May 2, 2023. Visit tomdale.org for dates and venues.