DU, Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, MOS review ★★★★★

Now celebrating its 45th anniversary, over its long and illustrious life Dance Umbrella (DU) has brought remarkable international dance shows to a variety of London venues. Performers of the calibre of American contemporary dance pioneer Merce Cunningham, flamenco disruptor Rocio Molina, Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance and South Africa’s Gregory Maqoma, to name but a few, graced Dance Umbrella’s programme year after year, making for an annual event to look forward to: an exciting, challenging, horizon-broadening dance festival.

Unfortunately, the past few years have seen a shift in its programming, so that it’s becoming all umbrella and very little or no dance. The writing was clearly on the wall a couple of years ago or so, when one of its shows consisted solely of a young British poet reciting her poetry. Nothing wrong with her poetry. It just wasn’t dance.

And so we come to Ioanna Paraskevopoulou’s MOS, running at the Barbican Pit for four nights. Hailing from Greece, Paraskevopoulou is described by the current DU artistic director, Freddie Opoku-Addaie, as ‘an artist who is challenging the nature of what choreography is and could be, creating captivating audio-visual experiences.’

I can only say that Mr Opoku-Addaie’s notion of choreography differs radically from mine.

What Paraskevopoulou does is use a variety of improbable materials to create artificial sound effects that mimic real-life sound. So in the first half-hour of this mercifully short 45-minute show Paraskevopoulou, together with her co-performer Georgios Kotsifakis, whom we first meet circling the stage on rollerskates (why?), use prepared coconut shells knocking on gravel to simulate the clopping of horses' hooves. Crushing dry vegetation underfoot sounds like people walking in a forest. A swinging flexible stick mimics wind. And so on. At one point, Kotsifakis pours a bucket of water over Paraskevopoulou’s hair. No, me neither.

This, by the way, is the sort of thing with which, decades ago in pre-digital days, the BBC used to dazzle visitors to its sound effects department, without whose ingenious props most of its radio plays would have sounded a lot thinner.

The performers have their eyes firmly fixed on a screen at the back of the theatre, showing clips from old movies to which they provide sound effects. Intriguingly, a dramaturg, Elena Novakovits is credited, though what exactly she contributed is hard to fathom.

So far quite clever, rather pointless, and certainly not dance.

Dance of sorts comes in the final 15 minutes, when the performers take to two boards wired for sound to engage in a repetitive one-two-three tap dance, which appears to be a reference to the endurance dance contest in the cult film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

There is, of course, a place for this kind of performance. It’s just that selling it under false pretences as part of a dance festival, no matter how left-field it’s trying to be, does the show no favours because it creates expectations the performers can’t hope to meet.