Review: Jefta van Dinther’s REMACHINE, Sadler’s Wells East ★★★★

Jefta van Dinther, RE MACHINE, Image Credit Elin Berge — Image Credit Elin Berge

Six bodies, one relentless machine: Jefta van Dinther returns to Sadler’s Wells with hypnotic force

There is a single unaccompanied voice. It cuts through the air of Sadler’s Wells East like something ancient, like a lament from a long way off. Then another joins it, and another, building and layering in something close to plainchant, close to fugue: one voice upon the next, each separate and yet inevitably drawn together. This is how REMACHINE begins, and it tells you everything you need to know about what is to come.

Dutch-Swedish choreographer Jefta van Dinther has been making rigorously physical, uncompromising work for nearly two decades, working between Stockholm and Berlin and creating pieces for major companies including the Cullberg Ballet and the Staatsballett Berlin. This is his first return to Sadler’s Wells since before the pandemic, and it announces itself with considerable force. Six dancers are placed on a ten-metre wide rotating disc, and from the moment it begins to turn, they are never entirely in control of their own movement. The disc does not care. It rotates with the indifference of a machine, and the dancers must negotiate it, work with it, fight it, and ultimately find a way to live on it.

Van Dinther has spoken of feeling simultaneously like an autonomous being making choices and a cog in a system governed by forces much greater than ourselves. REMACHINE stages that inner friction with remarkable precision. The movement vocabulary is built from the repetitive motions of labour: pushing, pulling, planting, hoeing, grinding, wiping, scrubbing. Each action is performed until it tips toward the point of too much, and then an almost imperceptible change is introduced, so small you might miss it, and gradually, without quite noticing how, the dancers have moved toward a new action entirely. It is a choreographic sleight of hand, and it is brilliantly done.

The use of levels throughout is extraordinary. The dancers inhabit every plane of the disc: lying flat, crawling, kneeling, half-kneeling, marching upright. They work at every level from the ground up, and the effect is of a complete world in microcosm, a production line that is also a civilisation. Sometimes they move together in fluid, undulating unison, almost amoeba-like, a single organism finding its way. At others they are taut and separate, driving downward like pistons, the muscular power of each body thrown into stark relief by Jonatan Winbo‘s lighting, which shadows and highlights the disc from below as well as above, making geometry of bodies and space.

The music, composed by David Kiers and drawing on the work of Anna von Hauswolff, is both internal and external, sometimes feeling as though it comes from somewhere far away, sometimes as though it rises from within the dancers themselves. The metallic, jarring sound that punctuates the score is almost an alarm, and the moments of song that emerge from the cast stop the breath. These are not simply dancers who sing; the voices carry weight, they carry grief, they carry the accumulated exhaustion of labour repeated beyond endurance. They build a tableau of song that lands with force.

Toward the end, ropes appear. The dancers use them to pull against the disc, to take some ownership of the machine they have been subject to throughout. It is a shift in the balance of power, from being driven to driving, and it arrives with the satisfaction of something hard won. They began the evening in scattered grief and isolation; they end with something that looks, cautiously, like agency.

The costumes by Cristina Nyffeler, developed in collaboration with a Swedish opera company, deserve particular mention: elegantly timeless, each one unique and yet clearly related to the others, they manage to feel simultaneously ancient and futuristic, as though these six bodies exist outside of ordinary time entirely.

And the repetition, which might in another work become wearing, here serves a precise purpose. Each movement almost dissolves as the next one rises to replace it, and the cumulative effect is of being drawn into a contemplative, drifting, mesmeric state, somewhere between watching and dreaming. You stop counting and start feeling. That is exactly where van Dinther wants you.

A meditation on labour, locomotion and what it means to be a human

REMACHINE asks what it means to be human in an age of systems we have built but no longer govern. It thinks about those who keep our machines running and whether we are cogs or people. It does so not through words but through the body itself, through controlled frenzy and collective exhaustion, through the mesmerising turn of a disc that never stops and a cast of six, Brittanie Brown, Gyung Moo Kim, Leah Marojeviç, Manon Parent, Roger Sala Reyner and Sarah Stanley, who rise to every demand placed upon them. It is a work of considerable and lasting power.

[Thank you to Sadler’s Wells for a gifted ticket for an honest review.]

Article images: Jubal Battistii

RUNNING TIME: 1 hour 15 minutes, no interval