Minimalism has many guises. If the opening of the Dance Reflections season had featured the cleanest of compositions in Lucinda Childs’ 1979 Dance, Katerina Andreou’s BSTRD (2018) is a down-and-dirty feat of endurance, throbbing with a force at once vital and oppressive. Lights flare aggressively behind a raised platform. Andreou, determinedly casual in T-shirt, trousers and trainers, places a record on a turntable. It plays a hammering pulse, nail-like beats and a skull-drilling drone, all on a primordial four-count rhythm that keeps its stranglehold on the piece throughout.
Part clubber, part folk dancer, always a slave to the rhythm, Andreou jogs, bops, bounces, jiggles and sidesteps, first straight-on, then side-on, then round the edges, each rudimentary step combo repeated right, then left, then right, then left.
Sameness highlights moments of difference. She takes off her T-shirt. There’s an identical one beneath. She escapes from the platform, then returns to it. She flips the record. The B-side plays the same rhythm. There’s one big, nonreversible change: the end. Andreou exits, leaving chalky clouds and soothing piano chords hanging in the air. The physical and mental relief is palpable. Worth it?
Still, it’s clear that Andreou is in pursuit of a path and a purpose. Christian Rizzo’s une maison (2019) follows a far more desultory, dreamlike dramaturgy. A mysterious white-masked man opens the set and mythic apparitions emerge several times: totemic celebrants in animal-head masks, figures towering in long conical hats, a ghost draped in white. Above the stage hangs an irregular lattice of strip lights, which flicker and glow like neurons in some artificial brain. Below, a pyramid of earth is dispersed in billowing spadefuls, and pairs of people ritually upend buckets of soil, raked over by the cone-heads.
As the soundtrack veers from squeaks and crackles to booming beats, and back again, the 14-strong cast draw from a common repertoire of moves: low lunge, seated pike, shoulder stand, hand-holds, head-pushes. This imparts a loose coherence to the disparate group, which tightens at the end into a chain dance, in those animal masks, like a unified tribe. A dreamworld may need no sense of direction, but this journey has been, and felt like, a very rambling trip.
• Dance Reflections festival continues until 23 March.
