THEATRE REVIEW: Everything All Of The Time - Contact Theatre, Manchester.

Manchester's Contact Theatre has reopened their refurbished venue with a bang. Blending dance, poetry, physical theatre and a lot of haze effects, “Everything All Of The Time” is the new show from Contact Young Company performed on the main stage.

On a large sparse stage with only the starkest of lighting and a plain cyclorama at the back, the company of young performers had just simple black costumes and kilowatts of energy to make an impact with. Which they did.

Yandass Ndlovu’s choreography was very grounded, almost haka-like in style, with stamps and kicks and curved arms and yells. Often the entire company worked as a group, facing the audience. At other times they broke off into couples, fixated on each other’s faces and not touching as they writhed around each other’s bodies in contorted shapes. At all times they kept strength and power. A variety of musical tracks, with the common traits of being very loud and very full of synthesisers, boomed around them.

Interspersing the group dances were assorted solo dramatic and dance performances. Director Matt Fenton kept the presentation of the dramatic ones very simple: the performers facing the audience and talking directly to them in conversational and chatty tones. It was not mentioned, but the texts seem to have been written by the performers themselves.

The initial one opened the show, in both Welsh and English (this reviewer would like to see more Welsh-language theatre in Manchester……), by a friendly young woman celebrating how long it has been since we could all be in a room together. A young man had a forceful poem about being put into boxes. A young woman had a wistful litany about the desire for intimacy. Another young woman discussed being “the quiet girl.” And a young man with a stand-up comedian’s timing ran through a rapid, rhythmic patter of all the news headlines from the past eighteen months, from the dark to the trivial, and was noticeably enjoying himself and the audience’s reactions in the process.

Featured dance solos were more internally focused in nature. One was by a young woman who made a great use of stillness and the exhalation of breath. Another was by a young woman on a pole, who made use of some very acrobatic poses and tricks, while still keeping the powerful strength of Ndlovu’s choreography.

The overall sense of the piece was of a group of young people who had been confined by the events of the last eighteen months, and were now bursting out of their collective cocoon. The main stage is a large one, and they filled it.

Reviewer - Thalia Terpsichore
on - 7.10.21