Natalie Maria Clark’s Old Tricks New Dogs is billed as a barking mad, immersive, collaborative dance-theatre venture. It is definitely that: at times, subtly mysterious, never predictable and entirely beguiling, a quality it shares with Clark’s three major earlier works, How to Make Friends And Still Appear Normal, Apt Y Idos and Everything Anyone Ever Wanted.

The nine dancers who have co-developed this work with Clark are confident, fluid movers who continually morph from human to canine-like and back again. As humans, they experience flickering emotions and motivations; by turns flighty and ferocious, combative and compassionate, watchful and wrathful. They tell jokes, leap and tumble, cluster watchfully in corners, break out in twos and threes and come together in occasional unison passages.

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Old Tricks New Dogs successfully and fully explores its theme of dogginess through movement, sound, props, personalities and proximities. This non-narrative dance-theatre work follows a thread rather than a storyline, but nevertheless feels complete.

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The work opens in the bar downstairs with a lively pre-tour pep talk from a vigorous tour guide/animal expert (Natasha Kohler) that takes us into the studio/enclosure. With her guidance, and contrived health and safety measures, we are introduced to the vulnerable artist/animal.

Soon to emerge are 9 women in (lab) coats and arts-&-craft dog masks, who are interchangeably dancers and dogs, yelping, whining, barking, panting. Like dogs, they are excitable and affectionate, like dogs they cower with guilt and shame in the face of the anger of the alpha, and like dogs they forgive and forget their hurts at the drop of a high pitched “WHO’S A GOOD GIRL?!!”. And so the cycle of exploitation is set up. Natalie Clark – choreographer of an award-winning collective, she reminds us – satirically plays the alpha-Director, controlling and quick to criticise, never in a position of fault, ironically losing the respect she expects to be credited by her position. We are taken through a series of stories of agency, un/ethical creative relationships, and being an artist in the middle of it all. There’s no resolution or answers; in the end, we’re left in a mess without lasting change.

All this reflecting is wrapped up in absurdly humorous dance theatre. Throughout the evening we are treated to terrible/fantastic dog jokes, thoughtful movement phrases, and you’re-a-bad-person for-laughing-at-this moments. The dancers offer a confident performance, handling the acting and character consistently through unexpected twists and turns.

I do find there’s a lot going on, and struggle to process it all. There are threads that don’t seem to lead anywhere, and a few ideas that feel rushed.

As an audience, we are ushered and nudged around the studio throughout the hour, like sheep being rounded up and around by, well, sheep dogs. Sometimes we’re picked on, sometimes we’re taken care of, it’s nearly always confusing. Though the audience participation is more volun-told than volunteer, there’s enough trust in the absurdity of the work to think “screw it, why not?”. The confusion in the audience’s relationship to the work- from doing what we are told without knowing why, to validating Natalie’s fragile choreographer ego (or are we undermining it?)- both parallels and complements the power struggle happening within the work itself. As an audience member who has also lived some of the scenes Old Tricks New Dogs are parodying, it’s an interesting two-fold experience.

Old Tricks New Dogs is a quirky, humorous, and thought-provoking adventure. Back with a strong concept, Black Sheep Productions have injected playfulness into exploring choreographic and performative risks that the strong performance from the cast pull off paw-fectly.

Old Tricks New Dogs will be at the Basement until 12 August. 

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