Gulbenkian theatre, Canterbury
Actions speak louder than words as a talented cast take a guided tour of our most intimate relations
Didy Veldman’s @Home grew around the idea of being “at home”, but to think of it as a dance about that idea would be a mistake: the choreography is too good for that. The dance has its own source of meaning. True, the stage is set with chairs, a table, a mattress, a pot plant, and the opening section sees the five dancers separated into their own spaces within squares of light. But it’s the form and texture of movement – the performers reaching out and twisting back on themselves, each an isolated Möbius strip of motion – that gives the scene its quality; not the idea of home.
Keep that in mind and the work yields many rewards. Early on, there is a marvellously detailed duet for Theo Arran and Oliver Chapman. Despite their interlocking limbs, their moments of grasp and slip, the choreography places them in parallel dimensions, so that they seem present to each other only as ghosts.