Wayne McGregor's Deepstaria, Company Wayne McGregor, Photo credit Ravi Deepres.To start, it must be said that you cannot always produce a masterwork at every outing. McGregor’s prodigious output of the past few decades has largely proved a dynamic and commendable addition to the dance art form, but DEEPSTARIA (a rarely seen form of deep sea jellyfish which is at once breathtakingly beautiful, whilst also deadly to its prey) seems something of a misnomer. The troupe of nine dancers initially take it in turns to twitch and fidget about the stage (presumably) portraying various plankton, amoeba and krill-like lifeforms, but there’s only so much of this which remains novel and entertaining. Soon the spectacle wears thin and we find ourselves craving the giant sea monsters to devour the lot in one, massive, baleen filtered extraction of arabesque penché. Unfortunately the closest we get is a flim-flam of limp wrists parading as various barnacle-like creatures, but this remains an unsatisfying movement morsel, when one is yearning for a feast.
Excessive repetition was also a failing with McGregor’s Autobiography some years ago. The more recent UniVerse: A Dark Crystal Odyssey posed an altogether different issue with the masking of faces which created an unfortunate technological detachment. Here, the dancers’ expressions occasionally offer just a little too much humanity for the illusion of watery depths to be maintained.
The programme’s liner notes reference all manner of deep and hyperbolic inspirations when extolling the production team’s virtuous intentions in creating the piece. Simply put, however, they fail to deliver anything much more than nine moderately androgynous willow-the-wisps floundering about in the depths of (again, presumably) tedium and despair. The real creatures have the sense to go about their business thousands of meters below the surface.
Journeying beyond ourselves, we search for knowledge to illuminate and develop our human condition. At the same time, these spaces of infinite blackness, womb-like, are strangely familiar — sounding forgotten connections deep within, and stirring, perhaps, faint echoes of unconscious states of being, floating in places of before and after. — McGregor, waxing grandiloquently on his production, was surely goading reviewers to burst his bubble with this unforgivable twaddle.
The beautiful and ethereal sea creatures doing their very best to keep the production bobbing along: Rebecca Bassett-Graham, Naia Bautista, Kevin Beyer, Salvatore De Simone, Chia-Yu Hsu, Hannah Joseph, Jasiah Marshall, Jayla O’Connell and Mariano Zamora Gonzaléz.
