Ever known what’s it like to get plugged into the raw power of electricity- and then dance your socks off? Richard Lutz sees the ACE dance company in its current season.
Six dancers move through a grid zapped onto the floor, their bodies never stop, they jerk and move. Digital signals pulse on the grid and the back screen is continually moving, buzzing and flickering with video.
This is Switch the latest piece by the Digbeth based ACE dance troupe. In a two night run at Warwick Arts Centre, they used the small space to its full extent at times imitating a circuit board and at other times twitching as if digi-pulses were coursing through their muscles and nerves.
It is sheer physicality- no reason to try to put literal meaning to continual movement that must bring these dancers near to exhaustion.
Their accompanying piece, Listen, was more obvious. It was all about war, horror and the tortuous effects of battle. Not as gripping as the opening production- I caught a bit of sixth form earnestness about it.
But its predecessor, Switch, is brilliant- a dance number that boundlessly reflects our lives as we wake up each day enslaved by our need for electrical power, a stream of raw energy and unfathomable rushes of digi-info.
Richard Lutz is a regular contributor to the Midlands blog The Stirrer
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