★★★★☆
With this “performance exhibition”, focused on a single American choreographer, the Barbican cannily taps into the trend for staging dance and live performances in museums and galleries. Trajal Harrell is a gay black man with a patently eclectic sensibility. He lands on our shores trailing hype. Luckily a good deal of it seems justified, as for the next three weeks he and more than two dozen dancers are taking over the lower level of the Barbican Art Gallery and presenting, on a rotating basis, a selection of 14 works created since 1999. A talk, film screenings, a ballroom event and even a therapy session are also scheduled.
All the vivid, varied activities spotlight Harrell as a studious mash-up artist keen to mix and match cultural references and movement styles ranging from classical Greek drama, butoh and carnival sideshows to high fashion, clubbing and erotic dance. His best-known work (staged in the gallery on the evenings of July 29 and August 12 only) is Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church, a juxtaposition of two key New York dance “scenes” dating from the 1960s: that of Lower Manhattan’s postmodern experimentalists and the vogueing competitions held in Harlem dancehalls.
Visually the gallery spaces are stripped back and, in truth, somewhat skimpy with low platforms dotting the floor and banal wall projections of unidentified, ordinary-looking people kissing, boozing, showering. The layout offers no set path for visitors. You have to seek out performances, or let the performers — only a handful visible at any one time — find you. That’s not hard when dancers start charging in pairs down the gallery stairs to an intoxicating beat, then roam around strutting their attitude-dripping stuff. Or you might arrive just as three men draped in dark tunics slowly weave together and apart like mysterious, mincing muses.
There’s a lot to take in, including an extended extract from Caen Amour, Harrell’s coolly distanced nod to old-time erotic and exotic dance cleverly set up so that you can view either the performance or the backstage area. Some of it is beautiful: an anti-striptease by a petite young woman behind scrim walls in a low-lit room, making geometric shapes with her bikini top; or a powerfully rapt, nuanced solo for a lone male whose sculpted torso is tied up with knotted scarves. Bits are dull, such as a bilingual lecture on cultural theory, or oddly engaging, such as Harrell’s self-performed homage to the eccentric butoh legend Kazuo Ohno. But none of it is negligible.
Box office: 020 7638 8891, to August 13