Imagine walking inside a Bridget Riley painting and discovering that its blinding stripes had started to move, pulsating and swelling all around you. It's the kind of experience generally reserved for acid users, but in Klaus Obermaier's disorienting and sometimes extraordinary Apparition, it's the norm.
Obermaier's unique brand of techno magic is basically a moving light show, in which patterned images are projected on to and around dancers. But that doesn't even come close to describing its effects. As we watch his digitally transformed dancers dissolve into pixillated atoms, explode in iridescent colours, dissolve down black holes, and quiver inches above the ground, it feels like we're being transported to a world of alternative life forms.
In Obermaier's previous works (D.A.V.E. and Vivisector) the performers have been little more than passive receptors of the light effects and limited in their range of movement. But his collaborators in Apparition, Robert Tannion and Desiree Kongerod, have been briefed to develop a more elaborate choreographic input. Not only do their tumbling duets and sculptural solos bring a new muscular energy to the stage, but their supple, powered bodies dramatically enlarge Obermaier's poetic range. Kongerod, balanced in a motionless handstand, becomes a dragonfly veined in light; Tannion, seemingly caught up in an intergalactic lightning storm, twists and curves like a man whose atoms have been rearranged. In some sections, the dancers play directly with the digital effects, and during their opening duet, the pair cause currents of light to crackle between them as if the space was literally magnetised.
Anyone coming to Obermaier's world for the first time will rightly be dazzled by its hallucinatory beauty. Others though may start to find it limited, for despite the dancers' increased input, Tannion and Kongerod remain playthings of the technology. There is no room for an independent choreographic and dramatic relationship to develop between them - and given the dullness of the score, no musical relationship either. Obermaier's magic may open up spectacular possibilities for dance, but it has yet to cross the line into proper theatre.
