Firm Chameleon’s The Shadow, directed by Anthony Missen, continues to mine the seam on which the longstanding Manchester firm has constructed its popularity: fiercely bodily dance-theatre exploring interpersonal relationships. Right here, the guideline is Jung’s notion of the shadow self: these points of our lives that we conceal from others, even from ourselves. It’s a unfastened theme that holds collectively the considerably disparate scenes of this hour-long work, and dominates its lighting (tenebrous) and music (ominous).
Essentially the most intriguing determine of the six-strong solid, performed by veteran dancer Lee Clayden, bookends the piece however – aptly sufficient – typically seems at nighttime or on the sting of the motion in between. Who's he? Within the sturdy opening scene, he lies smothered by the our bodies of “shadows” (six black-clad extras, recruited regionally), a repressed presence in a scene in any other case given over to Reece Marshall – an elastic and terrifically fearless mover, who tumbles and hurls in pursuit of unseen ghosts. Elsewhere, Clayden looms like a distant information or witness, watching childlike video games from the sidelines just like the shadow of maturity, or steering Marshall’s steps like a father determine, each caring and controlling.
Whereas Clayden and the shadows type a cellular, typically interventionist hinterland to the piece, its foreground is given to scenes of ambivalent drive and drama. There’s a bruising battle between Gustavo Oliveira and David Colley – or would possibly they be shadow-boxing, their targets extra imagined than actual? Three couples coalesce between characters and their shadows, then interchange and reform, mixing self with different in addition to self with shadow. Colley reappears as a slave-dog in a cage, taunted by a supercilious Alice Bonazzi, who provides and withholds sips of water. Merciless torment or consensual powerplay? Maybe each.
Individually, these scenes are full of creative motion concepts, however cumulatively they have an inclination to dissipate a few of the work’s mysteries – the equivocal dance between persona and shadow, the real-world weight of imagined presences – in favour of bodily overdrive, amplified by booms and surges of sound. A bit extra mild and shade is likely to be welcome.
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