In times oversaturated with white noise, machinery and programming, is it the body that becomes estranged? NOICE/NOISE seeks answers by attending to dance’s greatest quality – its imperfection. Like a faulty sequence of code, the show’s system purposefully malfunctions. The three dancers, dressed in uniforms and set against a black and white striped background, are confined to repetitive, robotic movements. As if saving themselves from an industrial fate, they occasionally splurge into smoother, balletic gestures. Exiled from their algorithmic Eden, these robots even consider tap dance as an alternative to Python.
Choreographer Paula Rosolen effectively draws from the early 20th-century Futurist movement to remind us of history’s cycles: where did the blind fascination with progress lead us last time? Her answer could be more to the point – the dance hiccups at climaxes, less effective each time. Still, the trio compensates with the refusal of resorting to language in an age where words obscure the shortcomings of form.
Designed to disturb our senses, negative black and white – sometimes in melted shapes, other times geometric lines projected on white curtains – define the dance area. Three dancers cut through it, like newborns who just have to make sense of their surroundings. Informing, frustrating and provoking them are different kinds of noise: synthesised, equalised, clean, dirty. Also dressed in black and white, the dancers move individually as if connected only through sonic waves, elegantly combining balletic feet and arm postures with floorwork practices. An ambient trance sets the tone for nervous blinking while they point at their own eyes to stay open, and for knees positioned on the floor with mouths open in silent screams. Putting on pilot goggles suggests a war scene, but moments later there’s the sound of a modem connecting. Paula Rosolen’s NOICE/NOISE is perhaps about our own confused and loud modernity, to which we flabbergastedly return after the show.
Futurism is retro. Paula Rosalen’s Noice/Noise coats the back and side walls of the stage with low-tech monochrome patterns, from zigzags that evoke World War I dazzle camouflage to degraded greyscales, fuzzy geometries and amoebic globules reminiscent of a 70s lava-lamp. The three performers are weirdly retro too, not only for sporting starkly black and white costumes with the look of 70s sci-fi, but for the linearity and precision of their steppy, counted phrases – a style at once old-fashioned and, amidst the noise of our contemporary world, oddly refreshing.
Noise, as the title indicates, is key. Each scene wipes a visual environment with a sonic one, from ‘white noise’ blankets to radio crackles, smeary sounds and motoric drones. Each scene change brings a shift in movement motifs: diagonal angles, tap-dance syncopations, hydraulic hauls and lunges.
Does it get anywhere? Maybe not – but it’s a stimulatingly glitchy ride, nonetheless.