Colossus assessment – lots of dancers, lots of enjoyable in a present that goes whoosh! | Stage

Mass motion can have a walloping influence. Whether in navy parades or Olympic opening ceremonies, Busby Berkeley routines or the corps de ballet, an enormous variety of our bodies chiming collectively in exact formation equals computerized wow issue.

Australian choreographer Stephanie Lake is aware of it, and her piece Colossus, which was initially made in 2018, has been carried out everywhere in the world. Clips from it went viral on-line. Now it has a UK premiere with a forged of 60 college students from the London Contemporary Dance School – sufficient of them to fill the stage of the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Just the bodily energy of so many dancers is spectacular. When all of them run directly, if you happen to’re shut sufficient to the stage, you are feeling the air whoosh by as in the event that they’re the blades of a large fan. Seeing these our bodies develop into an structure larger than themselves, or monitoring small actions working via the group, timed to the millisecond like a glorified Mexican wave, is immediately satisfying.

But that is greater than a up to date dance Rockettes. Across the tight 50 minutes of the present, Lake appears to be like in any respect the various things a mass of our bodies can imply. A melée, a mob, a staff or an viewers, a flock of topics being dictated to by an imperious conductor, a gang chasing down their sufferer. There is an ongoing query about the place the ability is (the reply switches all through), interspersed with dancers shifting superbly as one. Bodies laid in a circle for instance, pulse just like the diaphragm of a speaker.

The well-drilled dancers are on level; it’s an actual feat of logistics with so many limbs to get in the suitable place on the proper second, and the complicated order of, say, six factions all dancing out their very own syncopated rhythms on the identical time. Lake totally investigates the chances, with surprises all over the place. Inevitably you evaluate her with different choreographers who work with our bodies en masse, equivalent to Crystal Pite: Colossus doesn’t have the richness of language, emotion or dramatic arc that Pite manages, but it surely’s a really watchable, readable, pleasing and impressively carried out piece.