Naima Khan reviews Hubert Essakaow's Flow at The Print Room. At its best when it's not being too political.
Just as we use light to search out an environment, spinning a torch around a darkened space, in Flow at The Print Room, light searches us out. Within a shimmering blue cuboid that stretches from floor to ceiling, a dancer wields a beam gracefully illuminating the audience that sits patiently in the round.
Hubert Essakow's choreography of this dance piece based on our understanding of water is varied, occasionally funny and for the most part, mesmerising. It's at its best during moments like the very first scene, when dance combines seamlessly with Tom Dixon's design and Peter Gregson's compositions to make us contemplate water in its many forms. This shimmering cuboid, a dominant prism that stands in a sea of black is ice.
We're later treated to a flirtatious, wary encounter with vapour. The gentle steam that pours from the ceiling is simultaneously fun and frightening, holding an untapped power not quite understood and difficult to capture. But the five dancers- Daniel Hay-Gordon, Sonya Cullingford, Thomasin Gülgeç, Simone Muller Lots and Kieran Stoneley – are pushed and pulled by it, drawn in and out of it but mindful of controlling it. Then comes the storm.
Singin' In The Rain be damned, the power of water in its liquid form is uncontrollable. We are sprayed, splashed and refreshed as the dancers swirl and fight, moving symbiotically then chaotically in a shallow pool of it. In these instances, where essentialism is at the heart of the choreography, Flow is at its most rewarding, physically and emotionally.
But repeatedly, the piece breaks away into real world uses of water, making a blunt socio-political point that stunts the dance and isn't new enough to warrant disturbing the essence of the show. Projections of known statistics, facts and opinions are funny and familiar but they push Flow into an obvious direction. Images, not words and numbers, would have been far more provocative.
The costume design also misses the mark. While the female dancers are dressed in delicately coloured floaty dresses, their limbs elongated and ephemeral, the male dancers are almost blanked out by their khaki trousers and t-shirts. Unlike the women, the movement of the clothes around their bodies doesn't make much of a statement.
Still, the combination of movement, music and lighting in Flow supports a remarkable design that brings delicacy and a twinge of colour to the blank, waterproofed darkness of the set. It's brutal appearance feels necessary to contain this unique element and it creates an evanescent image that makes you want to chase it.
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