Echoes of the American Shakers are everywhere in Tero Saarinen's new piece, Borrowed Light, which is about religious community and commitment. They inform the spare, elegant aesthetics of its black-and-white staging; they shine through the clear, vernacular patterns of the choreography; they are vivid in the accompanying Shaker songs, performed with heartbreaking purity by the Boston Camerata.
But the deeper, darker energies of the piece emerge in the gaps that open up between the beautifully honed simplicity of the songs and the urgent pulse of the dance. For much of the piece, the eight dancers are grouped in circles and lines; united in modest, repeating moves, their bodies appear agitated by struggle and resistance. The rhythms of their steps become ragged and lopsided; their arms are thrust out in anguished protest, while their heads twist as if seeking out larger horizons. Even their costumes express conflict: decorous in the length of the swirling black gowns, but rebelliously wanton in flashes of decorative detail and bared flesh.
What Saarinen is constructing is a densely choreographed argument between devotion and protest. As individuals make agonised bids for freedom and couples grapple in deviant, erotic duets, the joyous line of the song Oh the Pretty Chain That Binds Us All Together starts to evoke images of imprisonment rather than community. By the end of the work, when a lone escapee confronts the rest of the group across a bare expanse of stage, we get a lurching sense of the spiritual terrain she has had to travel to make her getaway.
Yet though this production is richly original, and scrupulously intelligent as a pure dance piece, it has a natural length - which is about half its actual running time. Saarinen may have had very good reasons for eschewing narrative and character, but in doing so he has denied himself sufficient material to keep the work buoyant. For all its fascination and its expertise, Borrowed Light feels mired in repetition - and as claustrophobic as the community it evokes.
