There are no blazing political placards.
No specific times or places are writ large during this powerfully affecting piece from choreographer Christine Devaney and her Curious Seed ensemble. And yet, long before the end, we know: know that on-stage is a window into the everyday despairs of enforced diaspora, homelessness, and the loss of self-esteem and identity that creeps in when nowhere feels safe.
Devaney has elected to draw together almost more strands than can be grasped at just one sitting. Karen Tennent's anchoring design – a high wall that slices across the back of the stage – allows for physical and metaphysical images of fight or flight to push and pull against its fabric even as a backdrop of video projections suggests different scenarios. Devaney and her dancers – Tony Mills, Skye Reynolds and Andrew Gardiner – give tremendous bodily expression to the tensions and fears that fragment relationships from early unsuspecting calm to the hostility of a survival instinct that has no time for trust, even when believing in a shared humanity is what's needed most. And that humanity is at its brightest in the form of a child, Tallulah Molleson (aged nine), whose very presence – either at solitary play, or joining in the actions – speaks powerfully of family, the future and hope.
Every aspect, from the evocative soundscore by Luke Sutherland and Robin Mason – Mason's live cello is a mystical presence on stage – to the text voiced by Judith Williams, the emblematic use of rag-bag clothes and the involvement of local participants is burnished with thoughtful details and if Push struggles a little to find its conclusion, the cumulative effect is a bravura challenge to selfish complacency and a heart-rending cry for compassion.
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