In 1947, archaeologists discovered a burial ground that had been frozen deep in the Serbian permafrost for 6,000 years. The skins of the corpses were covered in vibrant tattoos, whose animal shapes and patterns spoke of ancient, powerful magic. Ice/Dreams/Fire is Laurie Booth's attempt to re-create that magic.
The stage is dominated by Tim Richard's hanging sculpture, in which brilliantly coloured shirts are wound in tight floral shapes around blocks of ice. As this petrified flower garden thaws into buckets and pans, Nick Rothwell's electronic score drips haunting sounds into the darkness; sitting in Greenwich we can almost see stalactites forming. When Booth, the shaman of this chamber, emerges from behind the sculpture, he is wearing a hood and dark glasses. He seems like a man watching only the visions inside his head; such is his performing charisma that he makes us see those visions too.
As Booth's arms coil around his face and body, he winds himself into a state of resonating concentration, out of which he assumes the shapes of whatever animals and demons inhabited the iceman's ritual world. He slithers on his back like a lizard, lolls like a hog, crouches and jerks like a monkey.
This is shape-changing magic but in the second section, Dreams, Booth loses the glasses and casts his spells out of pure dance. Moving through a fine mist, he speeds through semi-classical steps, stretches his arms around incantatory shapes and stills the stage with perfect balances. Booth may have racked up 20 years of performance but he's retained his old radiant arrogance; at one moment he tilts sideways to the floor and catches himself on his hand, seeming to hang, suspended like a crescent moon.
Disappointingly, the final section, Fire, doesn't possess the same distinct character - while the title promises a self-immolating closure, the material almost dwindles away. Yet Booth is always riveting to watch and, even in fade-out, he has a sorcerer's command of the stage.
