Theo Clinkard: This Bright Field

Sensorial and sensitive, Theo Clinkard’s This Bright Field is both almost brilliant and overly fragile.


In the brief prologue to Theo Clinkard’s This Bright Field, the audience is seated on the stage itself, forming a perimeter within which the 12 dancers only ever appear partially and ephemerally. That is in part because of the shifting lighting, but mainly because they keep moving – and moving among – a series of wheeled wooden panels, so we hear the performers as much as we see them. The dappled interplay of motion, sound and sight makes for a poetic, sensorial experience.

The larger-scale second part is split into contrasting sections. Now in a more conventional proscenium staging, its first scene builds brilliantly from slow, floorbound rolls, through halting yet synchronised progressions – as if the group were catching its breath – to leaf-blown lines of dancers tumbling continually from the stage front towards its depths. In the next scene, a naked woman hatches from a metallic sac, like a gangling newborn. The others, all nude, join her, and through the slap of flesh and the brush of skin they discover a kind of togetherness, which culminates in a choral song. The final section sees them in quilted red tabards, driven by a drumbeat and charging the stage front like defiant warriors.

If these scenes sometimes feel overly full of ideas, they do all hinge on the dynamic between group and individual, with the choreography acting as a kind of connective tissue between the dancers. Yet the seams between the sections are slack, sometimes jolting. Clinkard’s field is both bright and patchy.