By Spring Wise.
I went into this show honestly not knowing what to expect and I left feeling that I’d been on a journey I didn’t fully understand, and perhaps that’s how it was intended. The first minute or so filled me with dread that it was going to be like that episode of Spaced with David Walliams as a performance artist, but I quite quickly settled into enjoying it for the most part.
Dragons is an exciting and ambitious high art piece of dance theatre, combining traditional dance styles from across Asia with stunning visual projections and an extraordinary quantity of …silver air ducting. You know, the tubes with ridges on? Loads of them.
The ducting is pretty central to the whole performance, variously being used for costume, scenery, puppetry, and some really unsettling animation. I would have been sceptical of its scope to portray so many emotions and ideas, but it somehow worked.
Part way through the show, we were introduced to six young video projected dancers (who interact with live dance company on stage throughout) from all over Asia via voice recording and text projection, which did break the immersion for me a little, but on balance I enjoyed knowing a little bit about each of them throughout the rest of the dance, particularly their early creative influences and ambitions.
There were unfortunately quite a few mistranslations and typos in the text projection which was a shame, but I feel the messages were conveyed well enough to be understood.
Taeseok Lee created a beautiful and at times deeply moving visual story to the collaboration, with some elements incredibly realistic, like the waterfall, and others more like abstract dreamscapes for the imagination.
The spectacular shimmering jewel-toned costumes joined this to convey a mesmeric unrestricted joy and excitement, which is where the symbology of Asian dragons come in, with a very different tone to the monstrous often feared kind from our own European folklore.
Eun-Me Ahn’s vision of dragons are vibrant and optimistic, playful and childlike. The way the performers used their costume as puppetry, and to create beautiful fluidity of movement was something very special: this is without doubt a multimedia work of art and the fabrics and props are filled with entrancing character and in some cases, uncanny personhood.
The soundscape crafted by Taeseok Lee is evocative and fascinating in its blending of traditional dance score with contemporary electronic dance elements. I felt gently guided by it during some of the more visually ambiguous moments, perhaps by the dependability of the familiar rhythms and my trust in the music to express mood where my interpretation of the multicultural dance phrasing was too limited/the visuals were just a little too “out there”.
Some of the scenes are very long, and I think children younger than twelve would struggle to stay still in their seats to appreciate it, but this is a show worth seeing if you enjoy avant-garde performance art, or to widen your cultural experience from the Eurocentric theatre we’re more used to being offered.
Actually as I write, the list of people this show would interest grows… fashion and textile artists, prop makers, puppeteers, video DJs… There are so many disciplines entwined deep in the structure of Dragons, and I suspect different eyes will find something to catch their imagination and be fascinated by.
This isn’t a show for the more casual theatre-goer: interpreting it does feel like work, and it is overall an intense experience, but in my case at least the work was interesting, and I’m glad the opportunity to see one of the most important artists in South Korea right on my doorstep.
Tickets for Eun-Me Ahn Dance Company Dragons (Monday 24 – Tuesday 25 February 2025) are on sale at mayflower.org.uk or 02380 711811.
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