During the past decade, choreographers have been putting themselves at the frontline of the digital revolution to see how their own very human art form will fit into the advance of new technology. It is now commonplace to see dancers performing alongside digital avatars, or to see live bodies transformed by video projection into weightless atoms of pixelated light.
But Rafael Bonachela has turned the frontline into a battleground, with a piece that exposes its six dances to the most brutal onslaught of hi-tech sound and visuals. In choreographic terms, Square Map of Q4 could not be more accessibly human, its movement a repository of dream fragments, memory and emotion. At times, Bonachela's dancers are curled into soft infantile shapes, as if nestling in some tender past. At others, they are crucified by longing or flailing in a desperate fight for survival. The underlying logic of the lighting and video effects is equally accessible as the stage is transformed by crosshatches of sunlight, watery ripples and hellfire.
The point of these effects is not to illuminate the choreography but blind it. In this duel between the human and the digital, the dancers are bombarded relentlessly with one dazzling trick of light after another. Even more overpowering is Marius de Vries' score - its blasts of percussion and dismally wailing vocals, all at a murderously over-amplified volume, do not merely deafen, they make your entire body hurt.
Square Map of Q4 is an interesting experiment in how much sensory overload audiences can take before they simply shut down. Perhaps unwittingly, it offers a dystopian view of how traditional forms of expression can survive in a digital world. But it does no favours to Bonachela, whose choreography is at a significant stage of development and deserves to be seen.
· At the Lowry, Salford, on Tuesday. Box office: 0870 787 5780.
