2Faced Dance Company: Out Of His Skin – a review

Choreography: Tamsin Fitzgerald 
Dancers: Johnny Autin, Nicholas Bodych, Nathan French, Alex Rowland, Tom Tindall, Ed Warner

“Say what you need to say plainly, and then take responsibility for it” Ai Weiwei


When I received an email saying I could get tickets to see an all-male dance piece for just a tenner…I was pretty much typing in my card details before I’d even read the synopsis. When I found out it was about adrenaline junkies well that was it: forever a whore for a bargain I dragged my partner to the Lowry on a Friday night preparing for him to fall asleep and me to be inspired. As it happened, by the closing curtain, he was crying and I already had a scathing article written in my head.


Let me first clarify that this review in no way calls into question the talent, finesse and virtuosity of the dancers on stage because, for anyone who wasn't
 asleep in the theatre, there was no question about it: they were marvellous. My cynicism comes from a more sceptical view, I guess from experience, of the choreography I saw that night. My partner felt I was elitist; I felt I was entitled.

©www.2faceddance.co.uk

As the audience piled in, and half-filled the theatre, I noticed that the tall tower of scaffolding erected upstage right was housing a man in the foetal position, watching us for a reaction. A disturbing sense of Déjà Vu started to cloud my previously open mind. Once we were done with the attempt to build tension in the space the dancer ran around his tiny prison for a few minutes and then promptly threw himself off of the scaffolding and on to a huge, obvious, eye-sore of a crash mat that I presume was supposed to be hidden away to continue the illusion. I was instantly reminded of the ending scene in Black Swan and fully expected to see him emerge from the wings in a tutu and breathe “I was perfect”.

The choreography progressively disappointed me from then onward.

I could pick out, at least, four motifs that were easily traceable back to their workshop routes and it’s my (humble, I might add) opinion that these methods of choreographing should be seamlessly hidden away in the tapestry – unidentifiable. We had “listen to this music and move to the instruments you hear”: the dancers exaggerated the movement of playing a violin and added an ill-suited gorilla hunch to it. Next was “see how many styles of dance you can bring to the plate”: we had break dancing, contemporary, a couple of plies for ballet and then a selection of Latin ballroom flares which, frankly, were horrendously misplaced and kept appearing out of nowhere like a blundering uncle at a Christmas party. Imagine all of the above then throw in some “what ticks do you produce when you’re frustrated?” head jerks and ten minutes of “natural” stillness...and that’s pretty much what I witnessed. Although you’d also be right in imagining a GCSE drama piece. Certainly if you bear in mind the opening sequence.

To give credit where credit’s due some of the blame has to lie with the marketing around the piece. A YouTube video starting with a man hovering on the edge of a sky scraper and a plot summary claiming we’ll see dancers “Pushing every available boundary and risking everything until there is nothing left”? Well yes, to give the choreographer a break, it was the marketing that lead me astray. With taglines such as “unpredictable, fierce and tender” and “One man searches [..] for the next big thing” I was expecting to see some death-defying falls; a string of erratic twists on common choreography; maybe even a couple of lighting tricks but, instead, there were just lifts-that-we've-
all-seen, common choreography with no twists (let alone erratic ones) and a boring set that had so, SO much potential! The fact that the program even credited a stunt coordinator was baffling to me…did they hire him just for that one cliff dive at the beginning?

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I know that this may read like an unrelenting rant attacking very commonly used, very professional, choreographic techniques but, in reality, it’s my admiration for what the dance as aiming at that brings about frustration. This piece didn't need any techniques in fact all they did was cheapen the act. An act that may well have been ground breaking had they kept the speed high and the adrenaline pumped; transcending through the sweat and out into the audience. The themes of greed, frustration and angst in a struggling socio-economic climate were so incredibly current, personal and relevant that I wanted a lot more than what was offered. I wanted movement derived from hours of passionate, unstructured, improvisation; visibly exhilarated dancers pushing themselves to their physical limits then pulling back at the last minute, not because of choreographic direction but out of pure fear. Then going for it all over again just because they felt like it. Wasn't that what we were told we would be seeing? Risk? Rush? Fear? Instead they punctuated tense moments of “oh shit he was at the top of that tower and managed to climb through three other men to get to the bottom within seconds” with odd playground head spins and uninspired contact work that simply fell flat in the face of such expectations.

Again, I dispute not the ferocity of the dancers but the ferocity of the piece…I've seen it all before! I saw nothing new, nothing remotely daring that evening that would grab me by the balls and leave me feeling like I’d just seen the reincarnation of Martha Graham.

On reflection, perhaps I judge too harshly and it was just unfairly high expectations and, above all, taste. Taste developed after seeing some incredible works at the Lowry before: such as, on a side note, Hofesh Shechter’s Political Mother - during which dancers threw themselves around the stage as a three tiers of a live band smashed away at guitars and drums and a dictator figure towered above them screaming inaudible hate speech. The sight of that promptly pushed everything I thought I knew about dance out the window. Out of His Skin did leave me feeling subtly aroused…but only because they all took their shirts off at the end.