Depression is more than just dark, or down: it’s unremittingly bleak. Botis Seva’s Blkdog, a dive into the choreographer’s own period of depression, is that too. Its opening scene shows seven hooded, hunched figures barely visible in the gloom, seated at an untouchable distance from each other, faces down and away from us. A lighting rig descends to form a low ceiling that casts more shadow than light. From a murky soundscape of electronic smears and thuds two voices intermittently emerge, one of a child, another of a therapist. Suddenly the dancers slump, knocked sideways by a whiplash beat. Where will this mix of alienation, oppression, memory and interrogation lead?
In some senses, to many different places. The dancers scurry into lemming lines that circle the stage, cluster into unstable groups riven by the musical rhythm, or drill themselves into synchronised squadrons. The movement style, often close to the ground, is restless and inventive: beetling runs, cossack squats. Often a solo will stand briefly out from the group, one spotlit figure flailing upon the floor, or shuddering in perfect time to the rattles and scratches of the score.
There’s a cardiac resuscitation performed urgently yet coldly upon a supine body, a soulless orgy of simulated doggy sex offered for our pleasure (“give the people what they want”). Later, tricycling figures, playtime costumes and finger-pointing blame-games shift the piece towards the territory of childhood – though that certainly doesn’t banish brutality, both psychological and (with a baseball bat) very physical.
Yet if the scenes are different, their means are similar: groups either regimented or ragged, solos signalled by sudden spotlights and sonic switches, actions synched to rhythms, the stage smogged and strafed by lights. Though executed with consummate skill (plaudits to lighting designer Tom Visser and composer Torben Lars Sylvest as well as all seven dancers), the cumulative effect over 80 minutes is a certain relentlessness: taut, technically impressive and hard-hitting – again, and again.
Perhaps that’s in keeping with the subject: it is, and will be, a depressingly cruel world. Where does this lead though? Seva gestures towards God (there are tentative hymns at the end); I yearned for a more human face.
Touring to The Lowry, Salford (26 November) and The House, Plymouth (1 December)
