Maybe you should read Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction before going to see the Swedish prodigy Alexander Ekman’s Cacti, performed by Nederlands Dans Theater 2. Or maybe that would just make you late for the show.
Ranks of skullcapped drones try to replicate each other despite being isolated on plinths and cursed with idiosyncrasies. The laconic inner dialogue between a couple reduces their pas de deux to the most banal components (“What happens next?” “I think we’ve finished”) and the whole piece poses wry questions about what the difference is between a dance and, say, a termite mound, or assembling some flat-pack furniture Cacti is extremely clever, in a knowingly pseudo-adolescent way, and very entertaining if you’ve reached that stage of serenity in the ageing process when clever adolescence makes you glad, instead of just insanely jealous.
The evening’s other works, Paul Lightfoot and Sol León’s Passe-Partout and Jirí Kylián’s Gods and Dogs, have the same flaunting precocity about them, despite the relative venerability of their creators.
But NDT2 is, after all, the youth wing of Nederlands Dans Theater, and all the performers were clearly excited by the repertoire.
There may be doubts about the substance beneath the surface but anything that can inspire such fantastic young dancers to perform so fantastically well has been very wisely crafted indeed.
Until Friday (0844 412 4300, sadlerswells.com)
