Wayne McGregor/Candoco/Hofesh Shechter, Sadler's Wells - review - Theatre & Dance - Arts

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At first sight this evening was a pretty disparate bit of packaging. An excerpt from Wayne McGregor's FAR, inspired by Enlightenment ideas about the duality of mind and body, was followed by Set and Reset/Reset, Candoco Dance Company's reworking of an Eighties minimalist classic by Trisha Brown.

The climax was The Art of Not Looking Back, Hofesh Shechter's howl at being abandoned by his mother, performed by the women of his company.

Surprisingly everything meshed, thematically and stylistically. The first two works in particular make up a sort of choreographic Turing test of the relationship between what we consider to be truly human, and what merely a mechanical process.

After FAR's idyllic opening duet, bathed in the glow of flaming torches, a grid of harsh white lights behind McGregor's dancers kicks into life and turns into a psych-lab tyranny of blinking stimuli, driving them to hyperactive, rodent-like exploration of their environment and each other.

In contrast, Brown's robotically simple, sensibly flexible instructions provide an algorithm for something fresh, natural and heartwarming. The mixed disabled and able-bodied dancers of Candoco slide in and out of line like the world's biggest, most sophisticated graphic equaliser display showing what the music of the spheres would look like, if the spheres had commissioned their score from Laurie Anderson.

Shechter's piece is also, in a way, about shaping something that resembles a life from something that doesn't feel like one. His six powerful female dancers straddle the line where regimentation turns tribal, like Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation reinterpreting Apocalypse Now. And when they throw their heads back like blind baby birds we see the awful hunger beneath all that discipline and rage.

Ends tonight (0844 412 4300, sadlerswells.com)

Wayne McGregor/Random Dance/Candoco Dance Company/Hofesh Shechter Company: Triple Bill (FAR/Set And Reset/Reset/The Art Of Not Looking Back)
Sadler's Wells
Rosebery Avenue, EC1R 4TN