Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film Metropolis is the inspiration behind choreographer Karl Jay-Lewin’s If I Can’t Dance I’m Not Coming: a dance work whose title edits the famous saying, “if I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution”, often misattributed to anarchist Emma Goldman. The reasoning behind the show’s riff off this quote never really becomes clear: a lack of conceptual clarity that’s unfortunately symptomatic of the work as a whole.
Eight dancers on stage, accompanied by a striking and beautiful score by Matteo Fargion, ostensibly reinterpret Lang’s sci-fi dystopia about industrialised capitalism into a dance piece. Bizarrely, this involves two TV monitors playing clips from Metropolis at the front of the stage, the screens only visible to the dancers – whose eyes flicker down over and over again to the screens as they perform, like the choreography is being teleprompted.
According to its synopsis, the work is intended to “reject virtuosity in favour of dignity”, developed through a “democratic creative process” that it’d have been nice to know more about. There is undeniably something admirable about challenging preconceived notions of what defines artistic skill and completeness, as well as interrogating the hierarchy between choreographer and performer. But it requires some level of mental gymnastics to figure out what this has to do with Metropolis, really – and the result is a confusing experience that never quite coheres.
If I Can’t Dance I’m Not Coming, Assembly @ Dance Base, run ended