A slow, heavy partnering duet opens Camelia Neagoe’s exploration of work: dancers lift and support each other, only to dissolve into the chaos of day-to-day tasks and unfulfilled ambitions. Movement shrinks into smaller, more defined actions as the performers begin speaking: matter-of-factly describing their occupations, lunch breaks, and dreams of promotions that never arrive.

Words and actions spiral into absurdity: the dancers compare themselves to bananas, and their bosses are projected onto the back wall as cartoon monkeys. Despite the surreal potential of this universe, the performance never fully takes off. Scene after scene, a new idea is presented, but nothing evolves; everything remaining disconnected from what came before.

Work in Progress’s fragmented structure makes it feel far longer than it actually is. Individual scenes stretch far beyond their natural tension, causing them to lose momentum and clarity. While the piece earnestly gestures towards a critique of work and meaning, the anti-capitalist statements it attempts to make feel like well-trodden ground. Combined with a chaotic construction, this leaves the audience stranded, adrift in a world of generalisations.

Maria Chiara de Nobili

Camelia Neagoe’s choreography doesn’t linger on its initial physical exploration of work in modern society – an interplay between one body moving with slow, natural flow and another, possessed by robotic twitches. Instead, performers Eva Danciu and Mariana Gavriciuc slip into a subordinate, supportive, even explicative, role in relation to a rather literal narration.

This narrative, built through a collage of recognisable (if not already worn-out) images of alienated and exploited workers, unfulfilled promotions, and corporate Zoom-and-gloom, touches on the raw wound of contemporary workplace folklore.

The piece employs some inventive dramaturgical devices – the giving and taking away of trophies, a self-help speech about being the superior banana of the bunch – to bring these themes to the stage. Yet it rarely manages to develop them beyond their lowest-common-denominator expressions.

Perhaps the title Work in Progress is not only a thematic indicator but also a comment on the condition of the piece itself.

Zala Julija Kavčič

The ironic title of this piece refers to people who literally work in an office. A promising movement dialogue between two dancers at the start transforms into a conversation: the tone is convivial as they contemplate their lives as employees (‘Our job is very important’) at a company that sees them as mere cogs in the profit machine. A self-help voiceover tells them ‘We are all bananas – some bruised, some too small…’ and an animated video projection of a Zoom call shows a group of chimpanzees discussing upcoming promotions where the dates are extended absurdly to the 33rd of the month.

The themes of Work in Progress are clear but the execution is rocky. Pointless paper-crushing, jarring music and barking dogs depict the mundane and sometimes sinister nature of working for a multinational corporation but a scene where the dancers sing with disco lighting doesn’t further the plot.

The protagonists are evidently unhappy with their lot. The endnote finds them comforting one another, eating bananas and gazing into the distance – might human connection be the answer to a brighter future?

Greta Bourke

Camelia Neagoe’s Work in Progress touches on familiar, unresolved questions: how can we balance the work we do and the roles we play without losing ourselves? Rolling, shifting, supporting, and invading one another, Eva Danciu and Mariana Gavriciuc explore the space before addressing the audience – one a go-getter, the other simply needing a job.

We move through tableaux: a video call where characters are personified by monkeys, a lunch break, a running sequence, and a monologue comparing people to ripening bananas. The piece overflows with questions and possibilities that feel ripe for deeper research.

The red thread is clear, but the raised issues aren’t yet problematised enough to spark a truly compelling conversation. How can we project our own experience onto the piece – or be challenged by its questions, rather than simply made aware of them?

Awareness has grown for decades; what we long for now are solutions, dreams, and new maps forward.

Marco Pronovost