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a camp, LIFE performance, Sarah da Fonseca

Dithery fiddling, dippy existentialism, a bland, cheesy finish – and finally I’m out of here


If you lived here, you’d be at home now is a tantalising title. But what kind of home was it? Reader, it was the home of a certain breed of contemporary dance. The kind that mixes media, that misuses speech, that is awash with empty pauses. A lanky man in schoolboy shorts sits in a chair, after fiddling about for a while (there are many such dithery touches). A woman twitches like a nervy bird. Another guy picks her up. He puts her down again. Chairs are dragged, slowly. Newspaper litters the stage. There’s a film of a girl on a lawn, a Roy Orbison song. Nothing quite adds up to anything. Fifteen minutes long, and I was already a runaway.

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And where to? To the home of another breed. The dippy kind that’s all about being and sensation because, like, life is dance and dance is life. In Oh Abraham two women and two men come on stage, they exist for a while, and go off again – several times. Then there’s a film in which the women slither together as one through some grass, like a slug couple (minus the erotic interest). Back on stage, the women carry on slow-rolling. The men get together as well, but they’re mostly upright, with more sparring and dodging. The film returns. More rolling. A man walks towards the screen … and I’m running away again.

This time, to Sarah da Fonseca’s Fraction. The opening is promising, with its snazzy charcoal film animation, its line-up of three dancers with their nifty domino, ping-pong moves. It’s downhill from there. We get to a restaurant-bar, filled with cliched characters. Guys flirt with girls, mostly by just pestering them. Girls do that no-yes thing. It’s played for light comedy but, despite a few deft touches, mostly it’s as bland and cheesy as the lounge music on the soundtrack. I really wished I was home.