Gisèle Vienne, This Is How You Will Disappear review ★★★★★

Gisèle Vienne’s This is How You Will Disappear, part of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, is billed as simultaneously a giant installation and a dance piece.

Full marks to the installation. The stage at Sadler’s Wells is transformed into a dense naturalistic forest, dead tree trunks standing among a variety of living trees, their foliage creating nooks of darkness, the ground covered in dead leaves.

A combination of skilful, deeply atmospheric light (lighting design: Patrick Riou), mist and fog (fog sculpture: Fujiko Nakaya), and video (Shiro Takatani) brings this forest alive. When a brownish mist slowly rises from the ground, an earthy smell gradually pervades the auditorium. At other times whitish mist blows in from the wings or from above, you feel the chill of the dry ice, and the forest reveals new facets.

It is a deeply immersive installation, ominous, suggestive, drawing you in and at the same time feeding into ancestral fears of the unknown, of untamed nature.

Enveloped by a sound score that consists mostly of loud, unsettling noises, with the kind of drawn-out high notes that presage danger (Stephen O’Malley and Peter Rehberg), this installation appears to set the scene for a performance, and since the show is part of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, we not unreasonably expect it to be a dance performance.

Our expectations are defeated, however. There is no dance to speak of, and no coherent narrative either.

We first see ‘the gymnast’ being put through her paces by ‘her coach’. He helps her stretch, she does handstands, cartwheels, the splits. At one point he moves threateningly and is rebuffed. He slowly walks away.

Left alone, the gymnast launches into a dreamy sequence, her torso contracting and releasing very slowly, as an often indistinct and also very slow voice over tells us she wants to be the best in the world.

And then she, too, walks off, and again we’re left with the forest. Much later a man appears. He is ‘a rock star.’ A voice over tells us he killed his girlfriend. Truth to tell, we don’t much care. The coach appears and beats him up. It’s unclear why.

And then, after another long look at the living forest, a kind of epilogue brings on a man with a bow and arrows and a live dog, who could be a wolf, or just a dog.

Gisèle Vienne’s introduction to London audiences as part of Dance Umbrella 2019, Crowd, promised great things. It was an exciting, cutting-edge piece of dancing, where concept never squashed performance.

Matched against that, This Is How You Will Disappear must rate as a major disappointment. By itself, the installation would have a place in any major art gallery. The rest of it, such as it was, didn’t really belong in a dance festival.

Read our interview with Van Cleef & Arpels here.

Age Guidance: 12+ (contains haze effects, intermittent loud music and strong language, and features themes of death, suicide, sexism and homophobia).

A film of Gisèle Vienne's If It Were Love, directed by Patric Chiha, will be screened at the ROH Linbury Theatre on Wednesday 23 March at 6pm. Details here.