Reviews

Review: DeadClub (The Place)

Frauke Requardt and David Rosenberg’s dark dance piece takes the duo inside for the first time

Dancer Jordan-Ajadi in DeadClub
Dancer Jordan-Ajadi in DeadClub
© Camilla Greenwell

Prepare to die, the saying goes, but how? How exactly do you do that? Frauke Requardt and David Rosenberg’s new show, their fourth together and the first indoors, is a kind of rehearsal for death. It invites us along to our own funeral.

At least, I think it does. It’s far too strange to be sure. DeadClub presents a swim of ghoulish images and sets them to naff old-school dance steps. The combo becomes a deathly celebration of sorts. Stone-cold crows fall from the skies as campy male dancers in mint green short shorts shimmy and shoop-shooop across the stage. They haul themselves through the floor like corpses come to life, then waltz off with one another like kids at a prom.

That’s typical of Requardt and Rosenberg. Their work regularly out-Lynches David Lynch; a cutesy, cock-eyed aesthetic with images that gnaw at your like horror. Electric Hotel, staged in a stack of shipping containers, took us on a holiday from hell: piranha-faced maids stalked guests through the halls; blonde little boys dragged fire axes around. That it's danced doubles its queasiness: delightful and distressing at the same time. It’s like Saturday night television come to suck out your soul; skin-crawling stuff with a toothsome white smile. You never know whether to laugh it all off or run for your life.

DeadClub toys with the idea of false memories – those glitches in the Matrix that we call déjà vu. The programme argues that memories do more than we know. They’re the "future planning devices" that make sense of the world, but they can be mistaken – or even tricked. Requardt and Rosenberg, here, seem to be meddling with ours and, by giving us a glimpse of our own final farewell, it’s as if they’re helping us get to know the great unknown.

We stand around a square, shoulder-high stage, in black-and-white stripey party hats that match the black-and-white striped floor. Lights race round the edge like a roulette wheel, until they come to a stop, illuminating some poor soul. This, for a moment, might be their funeral. A scrawny bloke in gnatty Y-fronts leans down and asks their name, then invites us to remember our own memories of their life. The mint-green dancers do a dance in their honour. A woman in a party frock comes out with cake. Then the lights start again – spin, spin and stop. Your number comes up and that’s it. That’s your lot.

Framing it as a victory – a win at the wheel – takes the sting out of death, though not its innate surrealism or strangness. A one-armed jazz pianist might play you out, rising through the floor like a cinema organist, or else, you might get a glass box full of flames. Nude men stagger round cradling dead stags. Dead bodies plummet – thwack – to the floor. The imagery’s unhinged, but the rhythm’s positively deranged. DeadClub stops, starts and rewinds, then jerks forwards and restarts. Chaihine Yavroyan’s lights cut to black and Dave Price’s musaq falls dead silent. It’s like someone’s trying to short circuit your brain.

Odd as it is, though, DeadClub only rarely unsettles. It’s too wilfully surreal, as if anything goes, and Requardt’s choreography is too plain in its pastiche. Only at the end, as its intensity increases and a wildness kicks in, do you start to feel even a bit out of sorts. If this is death, well, I could live without it.

DeadClub runs at The Place until 30 September.