Iceland Dance Company/Sacrifice, dance review: Epic, ambitious fusion of visual artists and dance

Excitingly, visual artists are not simply token collaborators and genuine shape the performance, writes Lyndsey Winship
Like the Virgin Suicides doing Robert Palmer's Addicted to Love: No Tomorrow
Jonatan Gretarsson
Lyndsey Winship21 December 2017

"I ran a marathon once, in three hours and 34 minutes," Fridgeir Einarsson tells us. "This evening is only going to be slightly longer." Nearly four hours, in fact, of dance, films and pop-up performances from Iceland Dance Company that are in turn inspired, exasperating, boundary-crossing and bonkers.

The sex, death and screeching of Erna Omarsdottir and Valdimar Johannsson's Shrine is like turning up at Torture Garden and feeling totally out of your depth. One intense sequence has a clan of women convulsing and vocalising in a way that is elemental, terrifying and pretty amazing. Einarsson brings comedy, giving a lecture on corpse decomposition while a troupe of dancers flog themselves with rubber tubing to the sound of lounge muzak.

The gentler No Tomorrow, by Margret Bjarnadottir and artist Ragnar Kjartansson (he of the hit Barbican show) sees eight girls in matching jeans, white t-shirts and acoustic guitars, dreamily posing and strumming in sync, like the Virgin Suicides doing Robert Palmer's Addicted to Love video. The movement makes the sound, and the sound determines the movement; it's a simple idea, stylishly done.

Artist Matthew Barney provides the grand finale, a film centring on the evening's uniting idea: how ordinary things become sacred through ritual. Here the ultimate ritual, marriage, becomes a blood-smeared wedding in an empty shopping mall with a giant inflatable Dunkin' Donut. Barney is an extraordinarily original artist, certainly a visionary, even if that vision can be both startlingly deeply layered and sometimes ponderously self-indulgent.

This epic and ambitious show brings visual artists into dance, not as token collaborators but genuinely shaping the performance. Whether you like all the results or not, that's exciting.

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1/6