Dance
1984
Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
Mary Brennan
FOUR STARS
In recent years, we’ve made a reality TV formula out of Orwell’s Big Brother, with beady surveillance cameras snooping on cooped-up little lives in hopes of fisticuffs or unwise fumblings. Jonathan Watkins’s new ballet, based directly on Orwell’s visionary book, snaps us back from that “peeping Tom” salaciousness and plunges us instead into a dark, relentless Big Brother world where privacy or free will is no longer in the lexicon because neither exists any more.
The rule-book of how Party Members work, eat, sleep and even think is inflexible, and one of the most impressive things about this boldly uncompromising Northern Ballet production is how the visual context – with video imagery by Andrzej Goulding – realises the all-pervasive control mechanisms that Orwell imagines. On a huge blue-grey screen at the back, two eyes stare out over the uniformly blue-clad robotic corps. Just when you think the eyes are an unseeing logo ... they blink. And that is truly chilling. The visual chatter on-screen – grids, numbers, the colour washes that incite HATE week – more than compensates for the fact that there is no dance step that equates to the Orwellian Newspeak or Doublethink. There are, however, dance steps that can tell of love and tenderness, of individual spirit and tinderbox passions – and Watkins has the measure of them and more.
At the heart of 1984 is the illicit relationship between Winston Smith and Julia – danced with a wealth of expressive finesse on the second night by Guiliano Contadini and Dreda Blow. Winston has already strayed off the regimented path with his purchases from a junk shop, but with Julia his inner radical ignites. Their first touching of hands has an electric charge. Soon, he is swooping her up into high lifts, free as the country air beyond Party Headquarters. But they’re being watched, nonetheless, and the brutalisation of Winston – where Alex Baranowski’s evocatively doom-shadowed score really pounds home the horror – is almost too intense to watch... unless you are Big Brother. This is classical ballet with a cutting, contemporary edge in both style and content – a triumph for Watkins, and for Northern Ballet.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here