Sometimes choreographers use darkness to hide. Gloomy lighting, claustrophobic sound design and heavy mood can stylishly cover up a lack of clear ideas with faux gravity. And yet for choreographer Botis Seva, who started out dancing hip-hop in east London and now tours to acclaim across Europe, that darkness has become his cosmos and his material.
The eerie echoes, whispers and intense frequencies of Torben Sylvest’s electronic soundscore are paired with Tom Visser’s always atmospheric lighting. On the dim, hazy stage Visser finds different timbres of shadow and sudden switches of tone, and never enough wattage to clearly illuminate faces or costumes. Amid all this, Seva’s dance is like the workings of the subconscious.
A cast of six are clustered around a central figure, Victoria Shulungu, a powerful dancer who has been performing with Seva since the early days. Like some sort of sage, she’s as arresting in her stillness as her urgent movement. It feels as if this might be the artist himself, someone asked to lead, looked to for vision, but also seeking his own answers and salvation, in a cycle of struggle, hope, confusion, revelation and reckoning.
From quiet, sparse scenes, we keep circling back to amazing bursts of movement, like statements of resilience. The whole group dances tight little steps with wiry energy, a pure synthesis of body and beat. The dancers scuttle like critters, spring into the air, or are buffeted as if on high winds (hip-hop languages are deeply embedded in the movement, but also a nod to Hofesh Shechter, Seva’s one-time mentor).
The stage is framed by a minimalist set of tall poles that turn out to be LED lights, flickering like stars or flames, creating a wall or a cage. At one point they look like the teeth of a whale, with the dancers’ bodies repeatedly spat out between them. Until We Sleep doesn’t give out a lot to its audience; it is a deliberately opaque but immersive hour. There’s a confidence in being so sure of the work’s own world, and sticking to it; this feels like a deep dive in the mind of an artist coming into his own.
AtSadler’s Wells East, London, until 28 June