There’s a point during Atomos when video screens descend from the heavens (or in the case of the Royal Theatre, the flies). On Friday night this was greeted by a faint rustle of delight from the audience — it was time to don our 3-D glasses.
Choreographed by Britain’s Wayne McGregor, Atomos is a meeting of live dance and technology. The video screens, which materialize about half through the 65-minute work, project various 3-D images: green ants, numbers, computer code, an industrial silo, something that could be a torso, something that could be a nuclear mushroom cloud and even black-and-white footage of dancers dancing.
During the latter clip, the attractive and beautifully trained dancers from Company Wayne Gregor left the stage briefly. The break was no doubt well earned, although I wondered why we were watching a dancing video when perfectly good dancers were in the wings. A more important point is this: did the blend of technology and live performance work? I’m not convinced the video art contributed much. People tend to gravitate to technology in a somnolent way no matter what the context; in this case the video seemed to distract from the live movement.
That aside, there is much to admire in Atomos. The movement is a mix of contemporary and ballet technique — an unrelenting array of turns and lifts were executed with seeming effortlessness. The dance is relatively varied and yet, curiously, Atomos exudes a sense of sameness (it drags somewhat towards the end). The piece begins with a tight group of dancers writhing in a manner that seems both tightly choreographed and free form. This is followed by a playful pas de deux for two women. In mid-performance the dancers gathered solemnly in a row for synchronized movements that recall barre exercises — the line then breaks into two circles, arms uplifted, in a manner that suggested ecstatic tribalism.
The music, composed by A Winged Victory for the Sullen (the ambient music duo of Dustin O’Halloran and Adam Wiltzie), is predominantly solemn layers of chords: synthesizers, strings, piano. Sometimes the repetitive quality of the movement reminded me of a minimalist Gavin Bryars; elsewhere the score recalled the detached, lost-in-space quality of films like 2001: A Space Odyssey. With no traditional narrative, the choreography is oddly cool and abstract. Atomos seems even detached from the music, partly because the score offers little in the way of rhythm.
The performance was interesting, the dancing impressive — yet I found Atomos only sporadically engaging on an emotional level. Perhaps that’s precisely the point; maybe McGregor invites us to dispassionately ponder science and technology in a brave, new world.
Atomos repeats March 17 at the Royal Theatre.
