Alexander Whitley makes choreography with an engineer’s instinct for system and structure. In a recent work, Frames, he tasked his dancers with the challenge of assembling architectural shapes out of metal rods as they moved around the stage. In his new duet, Pattern Recognition, he works with motion-sensitive lighting, creating systems of movement for himself and the excellent Natalie Allen, which “teach” the lights to respond to human activity.
At first, the set-up on stage looks familiar. The lights (orchestrated by digital artist Memo Akten) throw up powerful white beams that strobe, slice and sculpt the space. The two dancers, meanwhile, appear quietly intent on executing the cantilevered leans, twists and rolls of their own choreography. As the duet progresses, however, the eight lights (neatly squat, black objects) start to trundle more experimentally around the stage; and as their swivelling glass “eyes” react to what the dancers are doing, they seem to interact with them on more equal terms, assuming an alert, enquiring intelligence that’s almost human.
When Whitley dances solo, the fluid tangle of shapes that he makes with his arms produces a correspondingly intricate configuration of light.
Later, when Allen dances with just one of the lights, its beam dips and rotates in questioning response to her own subtle shifts of weight and direction. At moments, the lights almost have choreographic minds of their own; soaring upwards on a rising chord of the accompanying music or clustering together in a cosily familial ensemble.
Pattern Recognition doesn’t quite stand up as a self-contained work – its dance material feels both too thin and too burdened with ideas to sustain its 50-minute duration. Yet those ideas are seriously interesting – Whitley has started an experiment that will surely furnish many works to come.
