Extended Play, How to Build a Universe Review ★★★★★

Extended Play is the company of Jamaal Burkmar, a young British choreographer whose distinctive style has already won him the New Adventures Choreographic Award and led to commissions from a number of dance organisations, including The Place, where How to Build a Universe is performed as part of an extensive tour.

The premise is more interesting than what materialises on stage. Apocalyptic events have left five people stranded in a void between worlds. Led by a mysterious disembodied voice they set about building a brand new universe. Except, well, they don’t, not really.

Extended play’s multinational contingent – Imogen Wright, Alex Gosmore, Haizea Andueza, Fern Grimbley, Pablo Reyero – spend an inordinately long time not dancing. The voice directs them to perform a variety of tasks divided into chapters with titles like Orientation, Calibration, Cosmic Soup and so on.

First seen in white underwear, they are ordered to put on colourful boiler suits with matching trainers, and to put on and take off visors and gas masks, the voice’s demands becoming ever more random.

They prance about the stage in awkward, jerky movements. To James Zoo’s loud, shrieking, dissonant music, some jog, some vogue, some mince, stopping abruptly at intervals to form spiky, motionless tableaux.

The voice, which is supposed to lead us through some kind of narrative, soon becomes tiresome, the combination of an unclear sound system and irrelevant flights of fancy making sections of the narrative indistinct and confusing.

Eventually they dance in welcome, if short, interludes of actual choreographed contemporary dance movement, which are energetic, interesting and enhanced by Barnaby Booth’s striking light design, surely the best part of this show.

In the final section the five dancers are joined by local performers, which vary according to location. Although we were promised dancers, of the four who joined in at The Place, only a young woman seemed to have any dance training at all.

Because the shtick is that the joiners come in fresh, not having seen the show before, what follows is a sometimes cringe-making section of improvisation. In the performance I saw one hyperactive joiner kept crashing into everybody else. With the dancers seemingly instructed to follow the lead of the amateur joiners, any attempts to create coherent movement – to build a new universe, if you like – were doomed to failure, and the show ended inconclusively with everybody clustered centre stage.

How to Build a Universe is undoubtedly original, outlandish, often pretentious and sadly not good, its ambitious narrative fizzling our half-way through.