Compañía Nacional de Danza

Making use of an undulating screen positioned diagonally across the stage, a rope that is pulsed across the floor as if indicating energy levels or secret messages, a floodlight on wheels that is manipulated by the dancers, and a ticking, brooding score by Thom Willems, «Enemy in the Figure» is a dark and thrilling poem about vision and perception, form and chaos. Light – as integral here to the choreography as the steps – filters across the stage in uneven and transient shafts, exploding and contracting the space, bathing the dancers in a concentrated glare or obscuring them with deepening shadows that intensify the ephemeral beauty of the movement.

Donning garments of layered fringes over their black or white leotards, the dancers burst out of and disappear into the darkness like eruptions from the unconscious, their bodies appearing as polyphonous instruments that can generate movement from any point. Ballet-trained limbs mutate into angled, disjointed shapes, inscribing convulsive geometries as they spin against their kinetic shadows, or generate endless chains of movement on a suddenly empty stage, the light bleached and even, the music a low, rhythmic, repetitive melody. In a universe alternately frenetic and calm, «Enemy in the Figure» presents a non-narrative of mystery and urgency, isolation and connection, the mechanical and the human: dance as a medium for infinite possibilities.