25. The Centaur and the Animal - Bartabas at Sadler's Wells

Another difficult performance to review as I feel utterly unqualified to discuss this one. Dance is not really an area of familiarity for me, let alone one where I feel any expertise and when it comes down to equestrian dressage, well... I saw the Spanish Lippizaners about 15 years ago, but beyond that I was completely lost.

Anyhow  - I must admit that whilst I enjoyed aspects of this, overall it left me a little cold. The images were exceedingly striking  (lots of cloaked apocalyptic figures, with high contrasting colours of black, white and red) and the horses were obviously highly trained, but the way they were being used didn’t seem to build to any story or concept. There was nothing for me to grab hold of mentally, to maintain my interest. I also found the entire thing very slow, each skill the horse was able to perform – whether it was the difficult trotting in one spot (check name of this) or collapsing – was repeated multiple times with no variation and I found it difficult to see what this repetition added to the performance.

I was also completely lost when it came to the silver man dancing at the front of the stage – I still have utterly no idea what he was doing most of the time (although as the entire piece was extremely abstract perhaps that was intentional. Mostly it felt like his segments were filler and I felt that many of them could have been improved – with more elaborate dancing or more clarity in the storytelling.

So, yes, I didn’t really know what to make of this – it didn’t so much challenge me as baffle me and it’s probably symbolic that my main reaction as we walked out was that my favourite horse was the grey with the red socks as at least it showed some spirit whilst it chased the man made of black man (the other horses were almost worryingly sedate) – I couldn’t manage to make my analysis spread much deeper.