Impermanence Dance Theatre is a seven-strong ensemble whose members met at the Rambert school, 10 years ago. Since then it has mounted a series of experimental works, most recently the rivetingly strange Da-Da-Darling (2015). Its new piece, Sexbox, is inspired by the work of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, author of The Sexual Revolution (1936), and the so-called “prophet of the better orgasm”.
To a score by electronic music pioneer Ursula Bogner, a disciple of Reich, the dancers enact a multiplicity of erotic events, from blissed-out, same-sex duets to teeming cluster-fucks. The costumes, by Pam Tait, reference the sci-fi aesthetic of 1960s films such as Barbarella, but what rescues Sexbox from being merely a fashionable exercise in retro style is its ingenious choreography and the headlong verve of IDT’s dancers. The piece acknowledges, in its subtextual melancholy and increasingly frantic coital strivings, that the search for liberation through sex is doomed to failure. It looks back fondly to Reich’s idealist dream, but from today’s perspective, and with the knowledge that “free love” is anything but free.
As one tight-locked orgiastic scrum settles to its work, we hear a ghastly clicking and sucking, like the amplified feasting of cockroaches. Sex is nature, and nature, as the American scholar and critic Camille Paglia reminds us, “is a Darwinian spectacle of the eaters and the eaten”. Season’s greetings.
