BLKDOG

Singapore International Festival of Arts 2023
Botis Seva
Sota Drama Theatre
Last Thursday, 8pm

Bleak and relentlessly so, BLKDOG plunges the audience into its greyscale world of isolation, injustice and depression.

Created in 2017 and subsequently developed into a full-length production, the dance performance was British choreographer Botis Seva’s breakout work, generating interest in his movement language that ripples between the swagger of hip-hop and the molten grace of contemporary dance.

Part of the Singapore International Festival of Arts 2023 line-up, BLKDOG opens with composer Torben Lars Sylvest’s soundscape of short, desperate breaths, a variety of voices and startling gunshots.

The dancers of Seva’s Far From The Norm ensemble are a hooded, mysterious presence, who seem to move as though the ceiling is holding them down. They crouch, scurry and slither, punctuating their movements with forceful jabs and pops.

Driven by the music’s ticks and scratches, the dancers shift in and out of tableaux depicting blame games. Fingers are pointed and hands are raised in surrender until one falls victim and collapses.

This tension is met with absurdity as desire is unleashed in a scene of gyrating hips and wild barking.

Thereafter, the ensemble enters in onesies as fairy-tale characters – one is a dinosaur, another is a king.

Gestures from earlier in the piece reappear, losing their sinister edge to playfulness. Nevertheless, light designer Tom Visser’s murky lighting suggests that darkness is on the horizon.

BLKDOG then erupts into short bursts of anger and violence. The ensemble is by turns seven fractured individuals and one obsessively pulsing body. Full-bodied unison sequences are repeatedly halted by abrupt switches in the music, with extended moments of stillness cooling the work’s white-hot intensity.

A voiceover at the end posits a return to the beginning, a quest for the origins of Seva’s dystopia.

One dancer emerges briefly from the group, arms outstretched as though crucified, only to be swept up in a series of bounding strides circling the stage. The cycle of sin, Seva seems to suggest, is one that is impossible to escape.