What the hell did I just see? Is not how I thought I would be starting this review of tonight’s activities. But let’s rewind to the beginning…
Illegal Dance is a unique multi-sensory dance theatre experience in which every audience member must decide where they stand, pick a token, rebel or conform and the six dancers on stage become 60 through the magic of real-time kaleidoscopic video technology.
Sound’s pretty good right? A collaboration between dance and technology, live in the theatre… – That’s exactly what I thought when I booked the ticket for tonight. With a 19:15 start time (which is irregular), I set out around 16:00 in order to get to the station and get the train with plenty of time to spare. There was no issues with the train from Lime Street to Deansgate, but when I got to Manchester it became clear that it was a match night – Manchester City were playing so the trams were busy. It was wet (on the ground) but it wasn’t raining or snowing. So I don’t really understand why the usual 20 minute tram journey took almost double that time. There were honestly points along that ride that I could have walked faster, and that’s saying something. But I thought nothing of it as I was early anyway.
When I arrived at The Lowry, the first thing I released is that the bigger theatre, the Lyric was hosting Rambert Dance and their Peaky Blinders show, so the venue was busy anyway. I’ve never really seen it that busy before, but I made my way up towards the Quay Theatre where Illegal Dance was on and I was a good 30 minutes early still so I grabbed a drink and sat down. Shortly after sitting down I was approached by one of the staff at the venue who told me to “remember to grab a pair of headphones because otherwise it would be a complete waste of time as the show was silent”. A few moments later another staff member appeared with a set of headphones for me and gave me a short introduction in how to use them.. There was some controls on them that would be needed when inside the venue.
As I sat there with my drink I started to notice the foyer filling up.. with an unusual amount of.. kids. Young kids (even though there was a supposed under 5’s restriction), a lot of young teens there too all in a large group so possibly a class of a school or something of that effect. Then a series of announcements were played informing people as to what the headphones where for and updating start times, which was a little bit.. unexpected, particularly for those of us who have traveled on public transport. The show wasn’t to start till 19:45 not 19:15 as billed. From 19:15 till 19:30 there was a ‘silent disco’… I don’t know why exactly, perhaps it was to test the equipment, as I am not sure if they knew or not, but you could hear their crew comms via the headset too. Ironically, the music was also playing over the speakers, so the point for the headphones at this point was? A quick note here that.. I wasn’t anxious before attending this event… Until I got there. A silent disco.. sitting alone at a table, surrounded by happy smiling faces, people dancing.. all good stuff, great stuff.. didn’t really do much for someone being alone. – There was even a person there who had a dog with her… Now it wasn’t a seeing-eye dog, so I imagine it was a support animal however, and I didn’t hear a peep out of it, so I can only presume it was.. very well behaved, unlike some humans, but we’ll return to that later I am sure. – In the past I have been to performances which were considered ‘relaxed’, which are special performances designed to make people not feel anxious.. this was not at all compliant with that experience.
At 19:30 the house opened and there was a large queue to get into the venue. I took my seat and the first thing I noticed was that there was a lot of empty seats inside the venue. Quite a few rows with only one or two people on them, but as you got closer to the front and the stage, the rows were much more full. As you go in, as always there are the notices about no phone’s / cameras or video recording equipment.. and then projected on to the screen was a large QR code where you could go to get a copy of the Programme for the show.. Mixed messages there. Also there was another QR code to enable some AR features.. this didn’t work for me, but apparently it really wasn’t worth it. At 19:45, the performance started with a cast member to the side of the stage speaking a monologue, the stage is in darkness till she makes her way on to the stage and is then joined by the rest of the cast of dancers… and let me just say this here and up front… The dancing.. it looked good, not great, but it looked good. It was modern choreography. I have seen better, that’s for sure, but again I have all the respect in the world for people who are talented enough to get up on a stage and perform. They should be proud of what they have achieved on the stage tonight. However, I think they were.. let down by a lot of other factors.
Firstly.. It wasn’t silent in the venue. Ok there was no music playing, as this was playing through the headphones that were given out upon arrival, but there was spoken word and other sound in the venue. The dancers wore microphones so that they could be heard in the headsets. The headphones were wireless headphones.. I imagine Bluetooth, as the reception was poor outside of the venue. Turn your hear one way and they get louder, turn the other way and it cuts out completely. So I didn’t really use them much until I got inside the venue and the performance started. Some of the headsets had rgb lights on the outside of the drivers. These lights responded to the audio that was playing. Inside of a darkened theatre this was extremely distracting. Particularly when it was only a few of the headsets that was doing this. Perhaps it was a feature on all of the headsets, but only a few were flashing.
If you are here looking for the positives, I am afraid you’ve missed them. I promised to be honest here and that’s what I’ll continue to do. Also distracting was behind me was the control desks for lighting, sound and other things too. The crew wasn’t particularly quiet in their communication with each other throughout the show. You could often hear them calling cue’s (and regularly missing them), but more so, they seemed to have lights lighting their desks, but when the house lights were down and the theatre was in darkness, the lights from behind were distracting, as they lit up the last row of seats. The Lowry staff let themselves down too by admitting latecomers into the theatre after the start of the show. – Firstly it’s distracting and disrespectful to the performers on the stage, but also to those of us who were seated in time for the start of the show. These latecomers used their phone torch to find their seats (and blinded everybody on the way past), took a while to find their seats, sit down and get settled.. then turned their phones off. – The kids in the venue were more well behaved than some of the adults there… Then there’s the usual coughing soundtrack (this gave me an idea), that comes with every show I go to see.. Except this time, it wasn’t drowned out by the soundtrack, it was amplified by the fact that the venue was in relative silence as the audio was supposed to come from the headsets.
The negative side of the dancers having spoken parts within the performance, and the audio being delivered via headsets was that when some of the dance was energetic, you also got to hear the labored breathing of the dancers too. I am not saying that they shouldn’t have been out of breath, I am simply saying I wonder if this was an unintended side-effect, or if this was supposed to be part of the performance… It felt like an oversight to be honest. We were told that there was two separate soundtracks to the performance, that we were free to switch between at any point during the performance, as much as we wanted. – I tried it a few times, but I honest to god really didn’t see the point. Many times I switched channels, both channels were playing the same audio. Once was a little clearer than the other.. but that was it. Towards the end there seemed to be a little bit of a different soundtrack playing between the channels, but for the most part I really just left it on the one channel. – I didn’t see many people actively changing what track they were listening to either… Sometimes there were abrupt cuts to the audio on the different soundtracks, it felt like mistakes from a technical point of view. It felt just a little bit.. unfinished. It was a shame as you can clearly see what they were going for in terms of marrying the technology with the dance and the general storyline, but it was let down by poorly executed technical aspects. The second half for example, the first cue was incorrect, and the audience could clearly hear one of the tech’s stating that he had made a mistake.. It just felt a little less than professional in places.. many places. – But I cannot continue tearing it to pieces.
In summary… I feel ever so slightly ‘mis-sold’ on Illegal Dance. I’d have called it more Performance Theatre rather than a Dance Performance. There was of course dance in there, but it was performance art, together with the technology aspects which really… It felt like some aspects of the show technically were in there for no reason other than the fact that they could put it in there. It didn’t add a thing to the performance. The second audio track.. wasn’t worth listening to, and the headphones were very gimmicky. There was a small section towards the end were the seven dancers were on the stage dancing together, and in the background there was a projection where the dancers split into multiple people, which made it appear like there was more than the seven dancers on the stage – but the effect was not kaleidoscopic by any means. Firstly it was too small to be effective and I really don’t see how or why it needed to be ‘live’ (other than the fact that it could be done). It felt like there were a lot of gimmicks in the performance. Needlessly. I almost wonder if they were included as nothing more than a bullet point to hit funding targets. The performance was commissioned by DanceEast and Support by Arts Council England, so there was funding of some sort involved, and that gives me positive hope, that if ACE is willing to fund the complete mess that was Illegal Dance, then perhaps there is hope out there that there can still be some coins shaken from the funding tree. The Programme for example being ‘free’ and ‘digital only’.. just felt a little bit on the cheap side considering the technology that went into creating the performance. Needless to say, I left the venue completely disappointed for the first time in my 18 months of attending events. – If you are thinking of going to see ‘Illegal Dance’ tomorrow night at The Lowry.. My advice would be to reduce your expectations.. or skip it.
And finally…
My instant karma for thinking these thoughts during and following the performance, and thanks to the start time being basically 30 minutes later than advertised, I was left with 8 minutes to get back to the station for the 22:00 train home. The go-slow trams went slower than on the way to the venue, so I arrived some 16 minutes after the train left. I made my way to the next station along to get the next train, and missed that too. So the final train I could get was 90 minutes after that. I inadvertently got to see Piccadilly and Victoria station, got to spend a good 14 minutes standing in the cold at Exchange Square then another good 34 minutes at Deansgate awaiting the 23:34 train home.. Oh and of course it being the last train.. it was rammed. So I spent another 55 minutes standing up traveling back to Liverpool. I’m off to bed.. awaiting the oncoming cold.
