Thu 12 Feb: Chiara Martina Halter and Oliver Walton, Company Sixth and Moyra Cecilia Silva Rodriguez

Chiara Martina Halter and Oliver Walton Metanoia

Company Sixth Algorithm

Moyra Cecilia Silva Rodriguez U N S I L E N C E D

Moyra Cecilia Silva Rodríguez’sUNSILENCED begins with an offering. Hundreds of butter beans have been sewn onto pieces of black cloth with long colourful fringes, and dotted around seats in the audience. The beans hold particular significance in Rodríguez’s home country of Peru, where civilians have faced state violence at protests, vivid images of which are shared through the programme notes. Rodríguez’s outfit is made from this same musical cloth. Each stomp of her foot is an invitation for the audience to join in, building momentum together as her high-energy jumps and the rhythmic chime of beans echo across the room. This defiant energy eventually gives way to a powerful sense of grief, as Camila Alva’s violin accompaniment provides a moving outlet for what Rodríguez’s open mouth, moving silently, cannot express with words.

If UNSILENCED unites the audience through our sense of solidarity and rhythm, Algorithm by Company Sixth is ready to divide the crowd according to their age and how online they are. Four performers dab, bounce, and flounce through a whirlwind performance collage that charts the rise of ring lights, selfies, video games, and viral dance moves. There were some big laughs for performers flossing to a mindfulness meditation, and singing the lyrics ‘B*** what the ***?’ in angelic harmony, in this comedically referential piece.

In Metanoia, Chiara Martina Halter dances alongside AI-generated versions of herself, filmed and projected on a large backdrop by Oliver Walton. Halter casts her long limbs outward, slithering like a lizard, prowling and stalking like a leopard. Her fluid, evocative movement is totally absorbing, to the point that I find I am paying little attention to the screen behind her, which transforms her body into an underwater creature with tentacles, before glitching between a zombie-like figure and a skeleton. A kind of memento mori, perhaps, appearing behind her as she expresses her vitality onstage, or a suggestion of where technology might lead us? Either way, as we grapple to find the right place for new technological possibilities, Metanoia reminds us of the continuing power of live bodies in motion.

Nia Evans

Moyra Cecilia Silva Rodriguez’s U N S I L E N C E D deals less with the motivations behind recent protests in Peru than with the collective energy they generated. Initially alone onstage, the audience join her in spirit, shaking the fabric squares stitched with butter beans left on their seats in time with her defiant stamps, skips, and punches. Rodriguez later removes her face covering—her costume, also augmented with beans and ribbons, appears like an abstraction of traditional Peruvian dress—stretches her mouth into silent screams, and sings melancholically with violinist Camila Alva. These scenes can feel somewhat disjointed due to frequent blackouts, yet the audience participation ensures U N S I L E N C E D’s overall success. Considering no instructions were given on how to use the unfamiliar objects, the response is a heartwarming display of the human propensity for solidarity.

Howls of laughter fill the theatre from the outset of Company Sixth’sAlgorithm. Aiming to mock contemporary digital dependence, the work cycles through references to the online world with the four performers flossing, dabbing and striking peace-sign poses, lip-syncing to a meditation podcast, and seductively removing socks beneath the glow of an LED ring light. The allusions, while clear, hint more towards the banal than the unhinged recesses of the internet, the speed at which the cast switches between them too slow to evoke the jittery overstimulation of social media, too brisk for deeper critique to emerge. Algorithm clearly plays for laughs, yet for this writer, the joke doesn’t land.

Human interactions with the digital world are also the driving force behind Metanoia. Dance artist Martina Halter begins the work walking slowly upstage, removing the layers of her skirt suit like a snake shedding its skin. The peeling process goes further when Oliver Walton starts to film Halter’s animalistic motions—bird-like head twitches and panther-esque crawls—using an AI device that projects freshly generated images on the back wall of the theatre. At times they appear like X rays of Halter’s form, at others, they morph into skulls and tentacular sea creatures. The effect is mesmeric, and serves as a compelling suggestion that there’s more going on beneath the surface of our skin than the naked eye can perceive.

Emily May