Alexander Whitley Dance Company, Anti-Body review ★★★★★

It is in the nature of experimentation that sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

As a choreographer who is also fascinated by cutting-edge science, Alexander Whitley has been experimenting with the ways in which science impacts the moving body for quite some time now. Can the marriage between these two seemingly antithetical disciplines produce something new and interesting?

Sometimes it can. Only last summer Culture Whisper was dazzled by his Celestial Motion II, which brought virtual reality to dance and created an immersive universe where the viewer wearing a headset was surrounded by vibrant colours and dancing bodies.

Sometimes, though, the concept is too big and unwieldy for its physical representation. Whitley’s latest work, Anti-Body, just performed by his Dance Company at Sadler’s Wells’ Lilian Baylis studio, must, I think, be chalked up to experience as an experiment that doesn’t quite work.

On paper, Whitley describes Anti-Body as ‘an exploration of the subject of trans-humanism, the idea that you can download somebody’s mind onto a computer chip.’

Anti-Body opens on a very dark stage (lighting design Sarah Danielle Martin), delimited both up and downstage by translucent panels. A repetitive thumping score (Hannah Peel & Kincaid) accompanies monochrome projections of what looks to the lay person like computer code.

A voice over tells us that humanity has gone from believing God was in control to believing man was in control, to the present day, when control has passed to Silicon Valley with the belief that life is no more than big data.

Black-clad dancers come on. Joshua Attwood, Hannah Ekholm and Chia-Yu Hsu are fitted with motion-capture sensors, which pick up their movement and transmit it to a computer.

Computer manipulation of these images then produces a variety of cloudy shapes, which dance on the screens to their own beat while the dancers, sometime singly, sometimes in a pair or trio, move between the two lots of screens. The work is divided into sections separated by blackouts, no section distinct from what precedes or follows it.

Everything is dark and monochrome, and that, combined with the repetitive beat of the musical score, has a numbing effect, which makes it difficult to concentrate on what’s happening behind the screens and its relationship with the projections.

More worrying, though, is that the choreography, consisting mostly of lunges – the yoga warrior pose is privileged – knee bends, waving arms and rotating torsos, is uninteresting and tells no story.

In short, the choreography takes second place to the overall concept and, coming from a dance maker who in the past has proved he is a good, solid and creative choreographer, this is rather disappointing.