A giant hand reaches down from the roof, as if to grasp a bundle of dancers on the stage; a monumental man descends, body slowly revealed like Naked Attraction, towering over the little people as if a digital god. The video screens in Lunar Halo, the latest work from Cloud Gate, offer up arresting images and the performers are as impressive as ever. But the result is a mix of grand visual gestures and sometimes directionless dance.
This 50-year-old company has entered a new era. For its first 46 years it was led by founder Lin Hwai-min, who retired in 2019. The dancers’ distinctively strong but supple, flowing style was born from their unique training incorporating martial arts, calligraphy and meditation. In this piece, under new director Cheng Tsung-lung, they look a little less distinctive – there are sections that could be by Sharon Eyal or Crystal Pite – and yet there’s still something in the quality of the dancers, the finessed detail, their ability to execute the smoothest slow motion and shapeshift through endlessly long phrases, and some sense of both spectacle and spiritual.
The theme is how bodies and technology coexist. The feel, though, is often more ancient than modern, with something ritualistic at work, dancers bound in rhythmic unison. Then there are more androgynous, anonymous figures in nude lycra, and the huge blank people on screens. Cheng presents these contrasts but hardly interrogates the ideas at hand, scenes arriving and leaving with all the reasoned intention of a late night phone-scroll.
Icelandic band Sigur Rós provide the ambient soundtrack. Its cold clatter and shimmer doesn’t feed the dance exactly (sometimes the choreography lays down a pulse in direct opposition to the formless sound) but it gives us an inescapable mood of uneasiness and disconnect. The atmospheric effect of the title is thought to be a bad omen, and it feels that way. If Cheng is concerned about the value of the human body in an age of tech, he could make a more convincing argument, but the piece is redeemed by a fantastically evocative ending, waking up to a post-apocalyptic dawn, a brave new world.
• At Sadler’s Wells, London, until 2 December
