The dominant colour of Jean Abreu’s Blood is white. The floor is white, the screens backing and flanking the stage are white, and Abreu himself wears a natty white suit over white vest and undies (we know this last because he strips naked at the end). But for his dark skin, Abreu might almost merge into the set.
That’s apt: the hour-long work is all about Abreu’s own body, and this featureless whiteness serves both to highlight his featured flesh and to cast it in a clinical light. Abreu measures the reach of his arms against the floor, marks the length of his forearm, the width of his chest or the span of his thigh. He measures his body up in words too, conversationally classifying himself in terms of age (“34 to 39”), skin colour, ethnic identity, waist size (small), foot and bum size (big). He dances in tandem with his own stick-figure self – a motion-capture animation of his own body projected behind him like a morphing x-ray image.
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That’s the outside, but there’s also an inside – and it’s here that the performance becomes more interesting. Abreu gasps and pants, so that we feel the ragged intake of air from outside his body, and its expulsion again from within. He uses a series of images by celebrated East End art twosome Gilbert and George, projected and manipulated by digital media wizards Mirko Arcese and Luca Biada, to flood the stage with visualisations of our vitals: blood-red gushes, vein-like marblings, corpuscular shapes, piss-yellow stains, glandy nodules, spermy worms. These are, not surprisingly, some of the most viscerally moving scenes, the shapes and textures of the projections running over Abreu’s white-clad figure as he undulates and spins, rolls and ricochets to the unpredictable plinks, pulses and pummels of Paul Wolinski’s score. You feel almost as if Abreu has been turned inside out.
A single choreographic axis pins the piece in place: a repeated solo with water bottle. First time round, Abreu eyes it up thirstily, hooking it in the crook of his knee and upending himself to lift it up with his mouth, before unscrewing it, gulping down the water, smearing into his face and spouting spray. Second time is a repeat – but now, the bottle is filled with his own urine (he’s pissed into it, discreetly but clearly, as a little entr’acte). Again, there’s the hook of the knee, the upending, the unscrewing… Don’t worry, he doesn’t guzzle it or anything, but the point is well made, both dramatically and formally: we see the exact continuity between thirst-quenching water and gag-inducing pee, and how that circle is completed by Abreu’s own body.
It’s fitting that Abreu remains a remarkably fluid mover, given the number of body fluids that seem to sloosh through Blood. Yet for all is thematic potency and its sensorial suggestiveness, this remains a very piecemeal piece. Its many short scenes feel more strung out than stitched together, with many jarring lurches of tone, not least in the music, which jumps seemingly randomly from plaintive piano chords to driving electronica and moody atmospherics, without much cause from the choreography – and the choreography itself tends to get lost among the ebb and flow of words and actions, images and imagery.
Blood is a departure for Abreu in a number of ways, not least in its ambition. Abreu talks a lot, and sings a bit. Some of his new collaborators – Gilbert and George especially, but also costume designer Richard Nicoll – are rather big-name pulls. And the work itself seems a real step up in terms of conceptual ambition. But it’s the ideas and the aim that impress: the material itself doesn’t match them.