Motionhouse, Nobody review ★★★★★

Dance shows in general have two basic options: go for a completely abstract work, and then the audience will simply enjoy (or not) the movement of the dancers and the patterns they trace in the space around them; or create a narrative work, in which case the audience is entitled to expect a plot it can follow, and movement that serves to illustrate the story and its development.

Unfortunately, Motionhouse’s latest show, Nobody, at the Peacock Theatre, falls between the two, its first part built around a narrative so thin and jumbled it’s practically impossible to follow, even if you’ve read the programme synopsis, and a second part that opts for abstract movement, but without enough creativity to make it interesting, despite various acrobatic tricks.

The first part takes place in a very urban setting, with Simon Dormon’s sets and Logela Multimedia’s busy digital imagery combining to create an eye-filling, ever-changing cityscape. Rectangular blocks dot the stage, looking like apartment buildings with illuminated windows; a very large multi-purpose cube centre-stage is variously a house and a restaurant and is eventually stripped to reveal an aerial frame.

Black-clad dancers wearing harnesses around their jutting torsos (costume design by Sophie Donaldson), make wings of their long arms, even as projections of flying crows fly across the backdrop and their cawing punctuates the thumping, repetitive and overbearingly loud score (Tim Dickinson and Sophy Smith).

Because we read the synopsis, we know these crows represent our inner voice, which dictates or inhibits our behaviour. Eventually we meet the human beings (each dancer plays a dual role as crow and human), as they go about their city business, now coming to a restaurant, now grouping around a TV show, turning the big cube around to reveal a solitary crimson-clad woman inside. You think this may be the beginning of a narrative strand, but no, it goes nowhere.

The choreography, devised in collaboration with the seven dancers, combines contemporary dance and basic acrobatics, but has no narrative power. I lost count of the number of times one dancer stood on another’s shoulders before diving into the arms of a waiting quartet. It could be a leitmotif, but it just came across as lack of imagination.

Half the length of part one, part two is stripped of all the props apart from the aerial frame. The dancers slowly emerge from a morass represented by a waving floor cloth and achieve a measure of freedom from the previously allocated roles. There’s much contact work, and a lot of climbing up one side of the frame only to come down the other side, more standing on shoulders and much throwing of the women in the air.

Motionhouse’s dancers, all graduates of contemporary dance schools, handle the acrobatic demands of the choreography with aplomb. They probably deserve more than this review’s exiguous star allocation; but for Motionhouse director, Kevin Finnan's concept and staging of Nobody, I’m afraid I have take a leaf out of Eurovision's book and say, ‘nul points'.