Dance Review
Compagnie Mulleras
Traces (96 Details)
Sadler’s Wells - Lilian Baylis Theatre
8 – 9 April, 2008
A review by Allan Taylor for EXTRA! EXTRA!
Traces is a contemporary dance piece incorporating sound and moving image to produce a dynamic fusion and interaction between a variety of media. On stage, the show creates a journey into a world of shapes and movements, sounds and colours in a collage of short sequences. Video projections on the floor and side screens create a new space dimension with which the dancers can merge. Timed to pin drop perfection, Mulleras really had their head screwed on with this production. With so many moments where the syncopation and synchronisation could fail, the company manages to pull it off as seamlessly as if the multimedia projections were moving with the dancers themselves. The heavy contrast between the mediatized and the real makes for a good interplay between the strong choreography (by Magali and Didier Mulleras) and the minimalist beats. What can so easily irk people about contemporary dance is its disregard for rhythm, but Mulleras seems to put it very much at the fore, making the snappy electro drumbeats and ticks an important dictator of the movement. Wavering between discomfort and sheer ambience, Mulleras create a work that thinks outside the box, as well as dances all around the inside of it before carrying it off the stage (quite literally, in fact!). Outstanding moments come when a dancer is slowly replicated in video repeating the same dance moves over and over again in different spaces on the floor. Sometimes the dancer follows, and sometimes not, challenging expectations but also emphasising the falsehood of the replicated dancers. Traces (96 Details) combines sparse sounds with strong colours and movement with impact to produce a contemporary dance piece with just the kind of punch that’s needed. You can either enjoy the fluid movement and absolutely perfect timing, or just let the piece wash over you in a sea of colour and choreography. Its minimalism and contemporary work at their best, combining big ideas with the technology that people should be forward thinking about. I’m already looking forward to seeing how Mulleras challenges itself in its next piece.
Mulleras is running till the 9th of April
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