ONLINE DANCE PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Catch Me - Upswing at Newham Unlocked Festival, London.

Contemporary Dance company Upswing have re-choreographed and reimagined their short piece 'Catch Me' for the coronavirus age, performing it live at The Greenwich Docklands International Festival as well as filming this short 12 minute piece to be viewed online.

This short piece explores what people's first reactions might be when seeing two people together of differing ages, genders and colours, and as such is a touching and sensitive piece. However, the movement is in the main rather slow and unspectacular, never really getting out of first gear, and the fact that the two never actually touch due to the new social distancing measures seems odd. Further there is the additional screen on wheels which is cumbersome and unhelpful which serves as their barrier each time they do come close, reflecting our contemporary lifestyle nicely but hindering the performance and the enjoyment thereof.

However, for me, even more distracting than that was the sound and videography. Live, I would not have had any issue with this at all; but filmed, despite seeing a live show, all the natural sound had been removed and the score for the dance replaced it, making it sound like a perfect CD recording of the music; we couldn't even hear the dancers as they moved like we would have been able to on a stage. There was therefore absolutely no atmosphere and the dance lost all its connection to the viewer, as the atmosphere and all natural sound had been totally wiped. Further, and even more distracting was the filming of this sequence. Had the camerman stood still and filmed it from one single spot we would have watched the show as we would have done in real life; however, the camerman was completely unable to stay still for more than a couple of seconds and took endless walks around the space giving us a dizziying 360 degree carousel perspective for most of it, and then chose to focus and zoom in on certain moments seemingly haphazzardly, since at certain times I would have preferred the full view, and other moments were begging for a close-up of a gesture or emotional response, and these never materialised. But it was the constant movement of the camera which distracted the most. It was neither arty nor complimentary, just offputting and unnecessary.

Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 28/8/20