Review: Cruel – the Barbican

After the agony that was Michael Clark’s Come, Been and Gone, I’ll be honest when I say I was not looking forward to Cia de Danca Deborah Colker’s Cruel. My brain concluded that it was probably a wanky Cuban dance piece from Cuba, combining a whole bunch of dance styles I have never particularly likes (latin dance just doesn’t do it for me) with contemporary dance and packaging it in a celebration of cruelty. Hip hip hooray.

If only you could write sarcasm.

I even allowed a little extra time before the show to throw down a few G&Ts to make sure I was in as cynical mood as possible. When the curtain rose on Cruel I realise I was grossly misinformed. This was not a wanky art dance piece. My brain was wrong. Thanks, brain.

Cruel is a collection of responses to difficult personal experiences from the cast and production team, focussing around a group of words. The choreographer and assistant choreographer presentedthe cast with very broad ideas, and then privately interviewed them on difficult experiences they’d had that relate to these broad concepts. The dancers then lived through these experiences again through a mixture of Latin, traditional and contemporary dance, with sometimes cathartic, sometimes disturbing results. However, the individual stories aren’t what’s important here, as the Choreographer’s Assistant states in the program, “What you see is not a soap opera, not a play. This is dancing. The stories are there so they may be understood by each viewer, in their own particular way.”

What’s important in this show is the feeling that you get sitting in the audience, watching these people contort and move in ways I wasn’t sure was possible with the human body. The passion and the feeling they convey through the entire show is phenomenal. Also, what’s core through the entire show is the quality. The dance is fluid, beautiful and full of true feeling and the dancers are all completely flawless. The choreography does an amazing job of conveying themes and stories, the sets are simple and perfect, with the table in the first act acting as a perfect piece to centre the action around, and the collection of mirrors a perfect representation of the themes present in the second act.

My relationship with modern dance seems to have improved through Cruel. Maybe it’s just that I don’t like bad modern dance.

Cruel is playing at the Barbican until July 3