Jeyasingh '(h)interland' reviews Khoo in reviews recent Shobana Jeyasingh reviews more Catherine Hale reviews

But the piece itself was so much better than its PR. Much more than a juxtaposition of “us” and “them” (Greenwich meets Bangalore), Jeyasingh’s promised “undoing of location” was a startling and surreal disorientation of the whole architecture of theatrical dance. It was also a beautifully formal study of stillness and motion, surface and depth.

The proscenium arch perspective was reversed. Our makeshift auditorium faced the balcony, which itself formed part of the ‘stage’. So the open doorway lit EXIT became our backdrop. Leading to the staircase and lifts of this faded art deco venue, it intimated a world beyond the black box of the theatre like a Narnia behind the wardrobe. Into this ‘hinterland’ Mavin Khoo disappeared in a sequence of delicate, deep plies.

There was also an array of apparently flat screens. One showed Chitra Srishailan in the equally surreal architecture of the Park Hotel rooftop in Bangalore (a bold blue stripe, trompe l’oeil for a pool, contained her dance) who discreetly warmed up for her performance as we watched Junk Box Fraud, a short video with vocals (Pete Gomes and Donnacha Dennehy) on another screen. Essentially a taster of the visuals in the main work, it showed a cruise through gasoline alleys of Bangalore saturated with synthetic hues of tangerine, lime and violet like an arcade game machine.

The last ‘screen’ turned out to be a trick of light as the flesh and blood dancers, Mavin Khoo and Sowmya Gopalan, tantalisingly emerged, in a swooping fish dive, out from what proved to be a bar counter! They dance alongside the flat video world of perpetual, looped motion and the real-time world of the webcast that was often suspended in inaction, with just the stir of palm trees in the distance. Three space-time realities in delicate conversation.

“Fine”, you say. “What about the dancing?” It was a nervous, uneasy derivative of bharatanatyam with idiosyncratic nods to ballet and aerobics that resisting blossoming into lyrical or expansive climax. Its accompaniment was an equally capricious and inscrutable kind of vocal acoustics with two singers in Gothic get-up. The dancers edged their way around the unsettling spaces as if testing the boundaries between reality and illusion; appearing now on the floor, now up the balcony in front of the webcast screen - tiny shadows against the relatively Bollywoodish grandeur of Chitra’s close-up face. Eventually they found each other, suspiciously at first then in playful, mercurial partnering. Khoo being shorter and slighter than Gopalan, they looked like Peter Pan twins in their matching Puckish costumes.

It was not a work for dance purists. The dance was more a way of articulating the perspectives and proportions of an overall artistic vision than an independent statement. But as an exemplary piece of multimedia (h)interland shone with intelligence and enchantment.