Rojos is a powerful tribute to those who died in or lived through the Spanish Civil War. Bodies vibrate together, traumatised; they soothe and melt together; they lower crosses, sing and testify; they cower and tire and go on.

Beginning in the dark from the ground up, feet alone are lit, footsteps and claps act as percussion. Gradually, the four dancers emerge as one raises, like a bell ringer, the light in their midst.

Early in, as the movement builds I’m awed. I think the stupidest thing: humans have bodies. (Dance shows me I live too often in my head.) This is when two are convulsing in synch at a high frequency. Roughly synchronised, there’s a tension between identical and looser time, showing the dancers not to be duplicates. Who sets the pace? They are energy. (Fitness!) They also synchronise emotions. They’re elated together, their faces drifting up to the ceiling.

How little (how few props) we need to express a range of life’s emotions. Shredded paper is thrown in fury or in glee. Dragged-body trails in the shredded paper. The paper is heaped in mounds. The dancers slowly raise beams from these. The stage becomes a forest.

A forest in which a duo slow dances. One dancer caresses another who remains limp, then testing the threshold of passive and active they question who carries who. They’re legato, figuratively tied together. Gravity is negated. The other dancers join them and they become a multibody, moving as one. They remain malleable in their poses, there’s no strictness but fluidness. Something internal guides their movements. Then their actions condense and slow. Two lightbulbs pendulum.

Rojos suggests dance isn’t a sequence of moves; it’s a capacity to probe and question through movement.

Dance contrasts with no dancing. There are spells where the dancers walk normally and do ‘downtime’ or ‘offstage’ things on stage like twiddling a piece of the shredded paper. Relaxing together, a clap is begun and the dancers are summoned into the clap / the game / trance. Casual behaviour becomes form-al. This isn’t performed relaxation – it’s genuine: this is physical theatre, pushing boundaries by contrasting ‘on’ and ‘off’.

Texturally too, juxtapositions are eye-catching. A high frequency fan contrasts its dancer’s slow motion. One dancer jumps in cold lighting, one in warm. Foreground explosive energy, background nudity. One tiny, hot cigarette dropped into a field of shredded paper.

And it has the audience spellbound. You could hear a pin drop. Even small sounds, the dancers clicking their fingers as percussion, or whistling, are audible. The content must be confronting. I wish I could follow the Spanish captions to a monologue delivered. A hunter’s spotlight is eventually trained on the audience to confront, perhaps to warn us, with what might be testimonies from the Spanish Civil War. 

Blood rains on the four naked, panting dancers.

Great ongoing applause.

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