Andros Zins-Browne’s Limewire* takes a long time to achieve very little. Four youngsters buck and headbang to the thrashing guitars and vocals of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, played several times over. There is only one physical idea: in the beginning the dancers sometimes match each other and sometimes go off on their own riffs, whereas at the end their moves become simpler and more synchronised, until everyone is pogoing together on the beat. This insubstantial, monomaniacal piece purports to explore the increasing conformity of youth culture. Actually, it is choreography as tiresome teenager: a lot of raw energy that keeps hanging around without really doing anything.
[pullquote1]
The five characters of Time to GO(dot) are up to all sorts. Framed by snowy TV screens in either corner, they fret and scurry with mad cries and whispers, form a squadron of loping automata, or desperately mirror each other’s moves. As indicated by the Beckettian title, choreographer Giuliana Majo seems to challenge us to find significance among the flotsam of happenstance and absurdity. In the end, though, she’s too cryptic, and never quite holds our attention. Unlike sound designer Saul Eisenstein, who sits in a corner muttering, ruffling books and crumpling plastic bags, echoing and amplifying these noises to create a brilliant soundtrack.
Hubert Essakow’s What Rainbow is a montage that mixes adult themes with adolescent humour. In the first scene, two preening women in cocktail dresses spin their dapper-suited men about the dancefloor. But it’s not strictly ballroom: the women do most of the leading and lifting, and the men are tentatively more interested in each other. In the second scene a woman grapples and wraps about a man in a manipulative, predatory duet. Finally the two men, wearing only black trunks, dance a romantic pas de deux to an angelic-sounding song that is actually about hard cocks, four-way gay sex and gushing climaxes. What Rainbow is well crafted, lightweight, and very very naughty.