Though it features some 70 dancers, James Cousins’ We Are As Gods is not only, perhaps not even mainly, a dance performance. A “takeover” of Battersea Arts Centre that spreads across its rooms, corridors and staircases, it is also part of the Centre’s reopening as a performance venue, reconnecting it to a live audience and – through its recent pay-what-you-can and relaxed venue policies – to a wider one.
One of the event’s aims is to let us experience the wonders of the building, from the mosaic floors and marble steps, through the cupolas and vaults that arch through its chambers, to the creaky back stairways, cubbyholes and fire escapes. An attic is arrayed with glistening gold boulders; one gallery is filled with statuary, busts and torsos adorned with tassels and brocades in a hybrid of classicism and surrealism.
Sumptuousness and sensuality is everywhere. We are guided by languid performers draped in gauzes, their eyes and lips daubed silver – part caryatid, part starship trooper. The more choreographed episodes often feature robing, disrobing and the exchanging of gorgeous garments – and Cousins is alert to their erotic nature, whether implicit in subtle glances and delicate finger movements or, in one more dangerous liaison for a couple in a satin bedroom, explicitly expressed in a dynamic powerplay between fabric and flesh.
Are we present in the dancers’ imaginary world, or they in our real one? The question itself becomes one of the evening’s pleasures. But what of the choreography? It’s great to experience dance closeup, yet its details can get swallowed by the sensory effect, by our own distracted wanderings, with each other – and with our phones. I sometimes longed for a more sustained focus to reveal the dance’s subtleties – flicks of the wrist, soft shoe shuffles, the cardiographic trace of a duet between encounter and departure – as well as its intensities; and to give more breathing space to Sabrina Mahfouz’s spoken poems.
That’s the trade-off, though, between a captive theatre performance and an easy-come easy-go event that is as generous towards the social experience as the artistic one – which is what makes this a night to remember.
At Battersea Arts Centre, London, until 10 October
