★★★
Everyone is wearing white wedding dresses. Well, not all the time but at least once, each member of The Wedding’s dance crew, got their stint in bridal clothes. Since the early 2000’s, this internationally acclaimed physical theatre company named GECKO has been gracing London’s most renowned venues in style with their inventive artistic rebellions against the societal constraints.
Taking on Sadlers Wells this year, the company have taken on our city at The Barbican and The National Theatre with this specific work since 2017. It’s a fine piece of dance work embroidered with music, multiple languages, jaunty comic sequences and slower, heart wrenching moments of embodied pain. It will thrill movement or theatre lovers alike.
The Wedding presents marriage as a contract, not just between the sexes but between the individual and society as a whole, setting up a power dynamic from the get-go.
Childhood is swiped swiftly out the picture. Performers shoot down a slide from stage right and, landing on a heap of forgotten teddy bears, they become conscripted into adulthood by putting on wedding garments. This occurs all to the tune of masked phantoms who saunter onto the stage by raised platform as aristocratic embodiments of the elite. If any of the dancers create any later sequence away from the twisted operatic period music which accompanies these elites, they are quickly seduced back in. The rest of the piece is a tug of war between authority figures that force them back into wedding dresses and the slow build of an uprising against the social order.
Rhythm and repetition are central to artistic director Amit Lahav’s seventh work and, much like the others which came before it, the audience interpret individual movements and cyclical sequences of dance themselves.
Multiple languages, not limited to Spanish and Italian are layered continually on top of one another, but gesture accompanies every word so that the basic desires or emotions of each performer can be understood. What you must accept is that though The Wedding has numerous internal narratives, they are often difficult to follow or understand completely. Understanding is not the point though. It’s a performance art that works at full throttle when the work remains mysterious, uncomfortable and oddly relevant to our own lives.
If you’re looking for a spectacle that will leave you thinking for a good long while on the train home, then The Wedding supplies. It may even make you feel for a moment that you might be able to quit your dead-beat city job. With plenty of heart and a fair share of defiant glory, this is a dance show with a difference, a work which is as much of a moving painting as it is a revolution.
Words by Harry Speirs
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