Dancing Thing

The last Toronto performance of Wayne McGregor's Entity (2008) opened Saturday night at the Enwave Theatre to a full house. A video of a sprinting greyhound is projected onto a white moveable canvas. Dancers from his London's Random Dance company moved throughout the stage in singles or pairs, wearing tight black shorts and white t-shirts with black and white DNA print across the midsection. Over the next hour, they would undulate, turn, spin, leap, and extend impossibly straight leg splits.

The music (composed by Jon Hopkins (Cold Play, Massive Attack) and Joby Talbot (The Divine Comedy)) started off primarily as violin strokes, sometimes in harmony and sometimes discordant, with electronic boops, beeps, and feedback. Halfway through the piece, the white backdrop was lifted into the air, with scenes of natural groupings now playing across its surface: flocks of birds, rock formation, microscopic organisms tightly bunched, the dancers (now shirtless) twirl over projected geometric shapes on the stage floor: divided squares within inscribed circles, lines, fibonacci spirals.

For the final part of the show, the video shows sound waves as fuzzy noise from a digital signal display. The music became first, a bass heavy slow jam, and then, when the spotlights came up to shine blindingly onto the dancers, an insistent electronic anthem. It was hard not to view those last minutes as the world's most athletic and gifted dance club (of course, that's exactly how professional dancers would get down at John and Adelaide at 1 am).

It was a good show with some exciting choreography. Even at typical contemporary dance performances, you don't often hear "dance" music. It was also obvious that some of the dance vocabulary made it into Chroma. But in comparison to that excellent work, this earlier piece does not have the same revelatory and transcendent vision.