Fleur Darkin Ensemble: Experience

Darkin’s work inspired by William Blake is big on ideas but thin on material


Fleur Darkin’s Experience is the second of two pieces inspired by William Blake (the first was Innocence). Both have childhood at heart. Whereas in the earlier work real children took part in a kind of performance playground, in Experience five adult dancers are successively “birthed” on to the stage, yelping and yowling through Darkin’s legs as she stands locked in embrace with David Reakes. The stage is still a kind of playground: there is a stepladder that the performers clamber over or drag about or upend, and a jumble of wooden beams they form into pathways, hurl against a mesh wall, lay out to spell words or build up into little towers that they trash gleefully, like tyrant toddlers.

Darkin and Reakes, it turns out, represent Blake’s mum and dad, who need to talk about William (Ezekiel Oliveira): he’s been seeing angels in trees on Peckham Rye Common. If the dialogue is pretty clunky (“I pray that you grow up to be normal and make friends”), some scenes cast a spell: four moth-like dancers swooping softly around Oliveira as he walks unseeingly among them; repeated rushes upstage that culminate in slow-motion arches, like action replays of runners reaching the finishing line. More consistently captivating is the music, an unpredictable mix of folky falsetto, noise textures, pushy rhythms and melancholy melodies by one-man band Paul Bradley, at the side of the stage.

Experience seems to aim for a Blakean vision: make-believe as a transfiguring force that flows freely in childhood but is dammed in the duller, more dutiful adult world of bank statements, shopping and hangovers. The piece doesn’t add up, though. Darkin is adept at directing different moods, but her trajectory is too piecemeal, her characters and choreography too sketchy to carry the weight of their own ideas.