There’s something about seeing people on stage who don’t look like dancers; just boys, lads, with unkempt hair, baggy clothes and last night’s hangover, bonding over a gaming console. It’s rare in dance to find a setup that looks real, but Yorkshire-based Northern Rascals deal in slices of reality and everyday truths.
Shed is the latest piece from the young dance-theatre company, performed mostly inside a set that looks like someone’s flat, boxed in by walls and windows, the dancers’ restless, rubbery bodies buffeted around its small confines. It neatly places the characters in the world rather than the theatre, and allows the audience to peer into their lives. The set also serves as a screen for projections, often of the show’s poetic text (by company co-director Anna Holmes) spoken in voiceover, which makes the narratives immediately legible in a way that allows viewers to linger on the details.
Shed shows us three episodes. One is about male friendship, about the desperation and stagnation of feeling left behind as peers move on with their lives. Another sees two girlhood friends reflecting on ingrained misogyny and the slow taming of their spirits that being female requires.
The third gives us a couple (Soul Roberts and Flora Grant), the slow crescendo of their relationship settling into a greyer area. Holmes and co-director Sam Ford have forged a language where Roberts and Grant don’t have to play out the plot but give it colour and texture. We see all the efforts of their bodies to connect: bashfully, awkwardly, trying to get in sync, tender or rambunctious, finding their rhythm but later shot through with frustration. They find comfort and yet a sense of defeat: “Somehow we’re back here again.” That’s typical of the tone of this piece, as if lives have settled under a low-lying fog. That might feel bleak, but it also feels authentic.
