Eun-Me Ahn Company, Dragons review ★★★★★

Visually Dragons is thrilling, its exuberant, ever-shifting combination of colour and uninterrupted movement blending live performance and video projections to joyous, initially mesmerising effect.

Dating from 2021 and now having its UK premiere at the Barbican, this is a show with no particular narrative; rather, it builds on the Eastern idea of dragons as representations of lightness, joy and optimism to create a relentlessly positive atmosphere, enhanced by Taeseok Lee’s imaginative video projections and Eun-Me Ahn’s own extravagant costume design, all glitter, metallic colours, unisex flowing skirts and the occasional reference to elaborate traditional dress.

Eun-Me Ahn Company, Dragons. Photo: Sukmu Yun
A company of eight plus Eun-Me Ahn herself perform behind a scrim, while six young Asian dancers join them at intervals by means of video projections. Sometimes the virtual performers dance to their own beat, at other times they interact with the live performers with remarkable coordination.

It’s called making a virtue out of necessity, as Eun-Me Ahn’s plan to bring those young dancers from Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan and Taiwan to South Korea to participate in the live show were felled by the Covid pandemic. The ingenious use of video to overcome the strictures of lockdown worked, adding an extra layer to what was already a multi-layered show.

Taeseok Lee’s video provides a variety of settings. As the audience files into the auditorium, the stage appears surmounted by a canopy of lush greenery. Later he will create a vivid explosion of fast-flowing water; still later a flower garden.

Eun-Me Ahn Company, Dragons. Photo: Sukmu Yun
Soft, flexible, metallic tubes constitute the one recurring prop.They curtain three sides of the stage, appear on video projections at one point reminiscent of the cover of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells album, and in ever greater formats are manipulated by the dancers to suggest external shapes or creatures.

Eun-Me Ahn Company, Dragons. Photo: Sukmu Yun
Choreographically, though, Dragons appears to use high energy as a substitute for coherence. Among the many influences you can just about discern is the late great German choreographer Pina Bausch, who often invited Eun-Me Ahn to her base in Wuppertal, but although some of the random sequences are vaguely reminiscent of Bausch’s work, there is nothing here of her expressionist depth and darkness.

Korean choreographers seem particularly besotted by cartwheels, and there’s plenty of those here. There’s a lot of turning, too, as well as sequences of coordinated arm movement to the persistent beat of Young-Gyu Jang’s music.

A rare slow, meditative sequence provided some respite from the insistent beat, and I marvelled at the elegance of the women’s arms and delicate hands. On the whole, though, Dragons didn't quite sustain its initial promise and just after the halfway mark started dragging a little.