© Maria Anguera de Sojo 'Giant Empty' reviews recent John Jasperse reviews more Lynette Halewood reviews

The set looked appealing: a diagonal line of wooden blocks was strewn across the stage, which was backed by a series of coils of rope which slowly rose to form a curtain of threads: this was simple and effective. The piece opened by a female dancer slowly in silence making her way across the wooden blocks, carefully balancing one to the next with great concentration. The rest of the cast of four joined her, and the dance developed into a series of off kilter duets, with much windmilling arms and lots of use of the floor.
 

John Jasperse Company's Giant Empty
© Maria Anguera de Sojo

There were some interesting moments here but the work took a different turn: the cast began to tie piles of old clothes around their bodies in great bulbous lumps. A few people began leaving at this point. The two men hid under the flooring and emerged in the nude for an extended duet. I am surprised just how boring two naked blokes balancing bits of their body on each other for about fifteen minutes can be. They both looked much better dancers (and had more interesting movements) when they had clothes on. Nudity isn’t shocking any more, it doesn’t have any trangressive quality any more because there’s so much of it around in general. It was just pretty unappetising. More people left. The final sequence saw the floor covering slowly inflate into a bubble as the dancers flailed around on it, heaping the wooden blocks together.

A hour and a quarter felt like a very long time indeed. A pity because there were some interesting ideas (maybe twenty minutes worth) which got lost in the rather over ambitious scale of the work