Fri 6 Feb: Manon Servage, Keer Xiang and Branca Peixoto

Manon Servage Eclipse

Keer Xiang Say Hi To The Light

Branca Peixoto Presence of Absence

The chatty Friday night crowd is quietened by the faint sound of rustling, difficult to place until we see a foot searching through soil projected on a large screen. Solo performer Branco Peixoto enters wearing a large white dress, as a film behind her shows Vivan Guyrá, in matching costume, turning and spinning across outdoor locations, an echo, or ghost, suggesting that she is here but elsewhere at once. The Portuguese word ‘saudade’, she tells us, is something like a deep longing for home. Peixoto grasps and floats across the stage, difficult to pin down, grounded by video clips of family in Brazil discussing saudade: a grandparent’s thoughtful description, a funny one-liner from a child. Their images are then projected directly onto her dress, and we see that she carries them with her wherever she goes. A warm, sweet invitation to consider our own connection to home.

Manon Servage’s Eclipse plunges ballet into the world of a high-end fashion show or queer kink night. Six performers, in nude cloth and black leather, conduct a disciplined display of athleticism en pointe, posing with legs thrown up impossibly high to throbbing club music. Just as their impressive but austere movements threaten to wear thin, the tone shifts, relaxing into something more collaborative, and less regimented. The dancers fluently support each other to jump across the stage, exercising a freedom that gives a satisfying counterbalance to the earlier half.

There is a buzz, in the audience and from the technical equipment onstage, as a white backdrop rolls down for the final performance. Keer Xiang and Izzy Bonny’s Say Hi to the Light features three performers, each holding a small torch, using distance, speed, and concealment to create a spellbinding interplay of darkness and light. A lightbeam begins as a football kicked between two players, until it becomes the moon, now a balloon. Our attention darts to the next spotlight as a performer shines a beam of light down their undulating body, their hips, chest, and head rippling in and out of view. Holding the torch up to her face, one dancer casts a huge self-portrait in shadow across the white sheet, each tiny movement writ large. This is live cinema, with close-ups of both an eyelash flutter and a tongue poking out of a mouth, intimate and incredibly precise.


Nia Evans

The “presence of absence” is a succinct and exact gloss of the nebulous Portuguese word 'saudade' – the feeling that arises when we miss something, someone, or someplace. Think longing, heartache, cherished memories. Brazilian Branca Peixoto takes a multidimensional approach to explore this terrain. On video, dancer Vivian Guyrá (absent as body, present as image) inexactly echoes Peixoto’s voluminously robed figure on stage. Talking heads, filmed in nostalgic black and white, explain what saudade means to them. Peixoto’s body itself becomes a screen, and her slips and swirls seem in pursuit of something ungraspable. Later, a smiling invitation coaxes the audience to come down and make their own feelings present. For all its warmth and fascination, the piece feels more like a personal project than a public presentation. Something is still missing.

Manon Servage is not the first, and won't be the last, to mash the aristocratic art of classical ballet with the commercial glitz of the fashion show, the electro-erotic energies of the nightclub, and the frisson of busted gender conventions. Initially, Eclipse appears in this mould: six skilled dancers in reveal-conceal costumes, all adroit in pointe shoes; spiky, eight-count enchaînements and sultry struts; arch attitudes and drilled, geometric formations. Then, as if conscious of its own high-gloss hollowness, it reveals a different side: solos, duets and groupings fuse and disperse, the dancers melt in and out of lifts and spirals. Even when they discard their catwalk carapaces to move only in underwear, the look is not more sexy but more human. Suddenly, both composition and content have become far more captivating.

Where there’s light, there’s shadow, and the three performers of Say Hi to the Light make the most of this simple fact using just hand-held torches, a white backcloth, and their own bodies. It starts playfully – a simulated kickabout with a little ball of light – and grows serious, the three figures casting their own and each other’s shadows in unstable auras, or writhing within spotlights of their own making as if simultaneously seeking and hiding from themselves. Reddish glows pulse like blood as they clasp torches within their own hands, and the screen is etched with lightsaber scribbles as intoxicating as firefly trails. There’s mystery to the meanings, while the craft is always clear, casting its spell with an impressive economy of means.

Sanjoy Roy

Branca Peixoto’s work, Presence of absence, revolves around the Portuguese term ‘saudade’, a concept deeply rooted in Brazilian culture. The video captures subtle bodily movements and explanations of “saudade” from Branca’s family members. These diverse interpretations resist a unified definition, instead expanding the emotional and sensory space evoked by the word. Branca shifts between language and movement, gradually layering white cloths upon herself to form a white “screen.” Next, a projector positioned at the front of the stage casts images of her family onto her body—a clever device that evokes those enduring, ever-present relationships in one’s personal life.

In contrast, Manon Servage’sEclipse focuses on dance itself. Six performers, regardless of gender, all perform en pointe. The contemporary ballet vocabulary they use is both expansive and forceful, effectively neutralising gendered distinctions in movement. The duets that emerge throughout the piece also depart from the traditional gender roles of classical ballet—where the male typically supports and the female is presented. Instead, whether in duets or trios, the roles of support and display shift fluidly between genders, never fixed to any single dancer.

Say Hi to the Light unfolds like an experiment in darkness. The piece opens with light and shadow playing across the stage backdrop and the dancers. Flashlights become the work’s most important “performers,” interacting with the dancers: sometimes held close to their bodies to dim the light, at other times directed towards the audience in a dazzling burst. Within the interplay of light and shadow, the audience can see the dancers from two distinct perspectives: one from a live viewing distance, the other magnified by projections on the backdrop. In this overlap of middle-distance shots and close-ups, Keer Xiang uses light and movement to turn darkness itself into a source of endless delight.

Zhenzhen Yan