The promo material for L’Homme Rare promised “insistent use of buttocks” and wasn’t wrong. Five naked male bodies spend the performance facing away from the audience, showing us only their back(side)s. No muscle is left untwerked; there’s a symphony of bottom slaps; and a quartet in formation like Swan Lake’s cygnets, with arms round each other’s waists, a bum cheek cupped in each hand.
As so often happens with nudity on stage, the novelty wears off and we’re left with bodies, different shapes, different skin colours. Note the hip bones, shoulder blades, dimples, the indentation down the length of the spine. Covered in a sheen of sweat, their forms are abstractly beautiful – except a body is never really abstract. Deliberately objectified, perhaps – that’s one of the themes in this work by Nadia Beugré, a choreographer from Ivory Coast, now based in France, showing as part of this year’s London international festival of theatre.
Turning your back on the audience is not without precedent. Trisha Brown’s 1994 solo If You Couldn’t See Me was danced facing upstage (clothed, though). Here it makes you study the forms in front of you, anonymised, yet not without individual character – one dancer also sings diva-like in patent red platform heels (a similar shoe later becomes a hat – and a codpiece). Movement comes in bursts, sheets are turned into props, you search for some dynamics in their interplay: a white dancer briefly holds the neck of a black dancer. Then the black dancer rests his head on the other’s shoulder. The moment passes.
There’s a theme here about reversing the male gaze. Beugré also experiments with “feminine” moves: the strutting in heels, the virtuosic, shimmying vibrations of mapouka, an Ivorian dance that’s a forerunner to twerking, traditionally danced by women. She makes us party to the exoticised idea of the erotic black male body. But these are ideas thrown in the air. Beugré may have engaged with them, but does she engage us in them?
• At Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, until 13 June. London international festival of theatre runs until 27 July
