A white space pockmarked with circles of dark dust, like black holes of misery. An empty lifeguard’s chair. A safety station, with bright red lifebuoy, and a telephone in its own illuminated box. This is the setting for Rhiannon Faith’s new piece, Drowntown, inspired by her research in Britain’s impoverished coastal towns, their populations beached by the twin waves of Brexit and Covid.
Originally intended to open for performance in the Barbican Pit, this piece for six dancers has now been filmed and will go on a digital tour. It has a force and intensity that would be better served live; on film, its bleak despair sometimes tips into the polemical. It feels overwhelmed by its own sadness.
But it is impressive. The movement is built around great propulsive twists of the upper body that send the dancers hurtling towards the floor, folded like hinges, rising again on soft feet, or swooping across the stage like flocks of wounded birds. Little repetitive twists of their head or neck, or obsessive touching of their face, reveal suppressed sorrow.
The dancers speak of their loneliness, scream their anger, their sense that they don’t matter. A disembodied voice on the telephone moves from panic about form-filling to a more generalised sense of doom. In the most touching moment, a silent, kind-eyed swimmer comforts an anxious, frantic man who has confided his sadness.
That man, Donald (Donald Hutera, a dance writer), is the only person identified. The others carry their difference in the way they move: one rushes on in flippers, one traces the space with a metal detector. Dom Coffey warns the others not to enter the poisonous ocean in front of them. Finally, they find a collective purpose, standing together, gazing out across the invisible waves. It’s not quite hope, but it is something.
• Tour dates at rhiannonfaith.com
