Scope - Diversions Dance House

Rui Horta Stageworks

Diversions Dance House
Wales Millennium Centre

This is relationships stripped bare – literally. This is a fascinating piece of interactive theatre that integrates dance, theatre, music and video in a gripping way.
From celebrated Portuguese choreographer Rui Horta comes an exciting new dance that combines sounds, light, technology and human bodies to trace a very physical encounter.

From meeting in a night club, where the audience standing around forms part of the action, with loud music, flashing lights, smoke machine our two dancers revel in the sexual chemistry and posing, corny chat up lines and that ultimate meeting of two people.

But image and facades can only be maintained so long so the pretences people put up about themselves to attract a partner (here represented by fake boobs, fake muscles) are stripped down to the real person inside.
With Scope, Horta offers us scenarios where the seat you are watching from affects your physical view as well as intellectually colouring your perceptions.

The dance is sexy and sultry, combative and powerfully athletic, slick and animalistic, with live video feeds and mood-reflecting lighting design projected on to the floor.

The ’armour’ is discarded until they are left emotionally and physically naked – with no protection for each other and sex and violence enters the dance as they challenge each other to get to the truth.

There is audience involvement in the dance which takes perception – and shifting perception - as its theme. The audience is met as they come into the performance space and given coloured wrist bands. Squares projected on the floor in your colour lead you to your eventual seating area – so don’t be surprised if you end up not sitting with the person you came with – well for a while at least.

The audience changes seats as the show progresses which contributes to the constant challenge to us to question what they were seeing, what was real, what was pretence, what is truth, what is real.

Expect clever and effective staging from this team with imaginative use of projection, sound and lighting so that technology and performers are perfectly blended.
Ultimately the dancers discover one another but what has the audience seen and has that change in their physical viewpoint altered their psychological or emotional viewpoint as well?

Mike Smith