Earlier this week, Britain’s weather systems – as if oddly au fait with London’s dance calendar, and determined to get in on the act – graced many parts of the country with a lunar halo. This phenomenon, in which an ethereal “echo” of the Moon seems to encircle it at night, is apparently caused by moonlight refracting when it passes through ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. It’s an astounding sight, so much so that any ticket-holders for Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan’s latest offering who witnessed it might have been forgiven for wondering what more a contemporary dance show could bring to this particular table.
The answer is, really rather a lot. Lunar halos are said to predict storms and, by extension, times of seismic change. And Cloud Gate artistic director Cheng Tsung-lung’s 2019 creation, which plays out to the primordial music of Sigur Rós, uses this as a jumping-off point to explore the ever-shifting, technology-obsessed modern age. True, it does feature an ice- and mist-shrouded celestial body at its bleakly beautiful climax. But throughout, and very much in the vein of Scottish Ballet’s recent Coppélia, we are far closer to the world of dystopian Netflix drama Black Mirror than anything meteorological.
Far more directly influential to the piece was – as Cheng explains in a strong programme note – a long night he spent in the YouTube rabbit-hole. As he ricocheted from one nugget to the next, he felt a swelling sense of subservience to the site’s algorithms and the corporate heft behind them. And so, throughout its interval-free 70 minutes, Lunar Halo sees the marvellous 13-strong cast repeatedly enthralled, dwarfed, and even consumed by razor-sharp, lyrical but nightmarish projections on vast, mercurially shifting screens.
The steps have two flavours. One minute, we witness a primal, tribal, loose-clothed ensemble stomp, a shared, hyper-physical rage against an ever-encroaching machine. The next (and more in the manner of the nuclear-age Japanese discipline of butoh) the choreography is slow, coiled, impossibly tense, the dancers dressed in next to nothing, every muscle and sinew visibly straining.
