Encoded

Encoded messes with your mind in the best possible way, creating optical and temporal illusions by melding live dance and acrobatics with a projected fluid video. The piece opened with extraordinarily beautiful figures, which in the blackness appeared to be made of swirling light. The light danced on their torsos and faces, brilliant red and delicate blue.

The figures moved slowly and smoothly down the stairs on either side of the audience. As they reached the stage, the ambient light lifted to show that the projection was thrown from devices worn by the dancers with the source just above their faces and also from the apexes of two triangular pieces extending out from their shoulders. They looked like meccano angels. While wearing these suits the dancers inched around slowly and methodically, perhaps owing to the constraints of the costumes. I wondered whether the light straight into their faces made it hard to see. There was obviously a high degree of experiment involved and I’d love to see a Mark II which allowed greater moment. Far from detracting, the slowness of the movement added to the hypnotic effect.

Once freed from the meccano angel suits, the dancers performed a fluid contemporary dance on the floor and acrobatics on suspended circus silk loops. At every moment they moved in harmony with the animation.

The show played with perceptions of time and space. Sometimes light swirled around the dancers like motes of dust in the sun’s rays, through which the dancers made slow, languid moves, giving the effect that time was moving at half-speed. Mid-way up the ropes, the dancers moved across the back wall as if it were the floor, so that it looked like we were viewing them from high above. At another point, the same background shrank down so that it seemed like the back wall was moving away leaving the audience staring into space.

Hypnotic, ethereal, almost meditative, Encoded was a wonderful example of the way digital technology is reinvigorating theatre.

Cathy Bannister