★★☆☆☆
With Terra the choreographer Hubert Essakow completes an ambitious trilogy of dance productions that find creative inspiration in the elements. Essakow’s previous shows featured actual water and fire. This time he and the designers, Sofie Lachaert and Luc d’Hanis, have opted for a cleaner theatrical environment. Terra is soil-free, perhaps in part because it’s about the concept of the Earth and the people who dwell upon it rather than earth itself. The trouble is that this concept lacks a sharper, overall clarity.
Formerly a cinema and now a grade II listed building, the historic venue in which Terra is being presented has been stylishly renovated (a continuing project). The atmospheric space in which Essakow’s work is performed is a temporary elevated stage at the height of the dress circle. The set is a jumble of blanched furnishings washed up against a huge, papier-mâché-like backdrop that suggests a severely rocky shore. It’s impressive, as is the cast of five adults and a child.
All except the girl — played on the night I attended by the beguiling Mia Manor in a role shared with two other young dancers — initially carry suitcases, a familiar symbol of journeying or displacement. These people could be a handful of immigrants seeking shelter, belonging and community.
Yet their individual intentions and relationships seem vague. A few duets, for example, are fine enough as movement — Essakow has a flair for shaping bodies into sculptural motion — but without discernible purpose. The dancers, too, resort to a few too many inscrutably meaningful looks.
The score, by the film composer Jean-Michel Bernard, slips between morose melodies, the pluck and blip of modernism and hints of jazzier rhythms. Sections from a poem by Ben Okri, specially written for the production and intoned as an occasional voiceover, add only a patina of pretentiousness. The net effect is handsome and earnest, refined but underdefined.
Box office: 020 3642 6606, to March 12