Beta Wave Transport @ Dance Base

With his influences from both Live Art and dance, Jack Webb is increasingly pushing his performances beyond the conventional solo improvisation. Interspersing impressive, yet not showy, moves with strange moments of prosaic gesture, like rubbing his stomach, Webb is finding his own movement vocabulary that is both unsettling and engaging.

At times, Webb's aesthetic verges on beautiful, but veers to the uncanny. His contortions are not quite acrobatic but push the expected boundaries of pure dance. Moments of an almost sexual energy are juxtaposed against stranger repetitions, as if his ideas are struggling to escape through his body. Fascinating and sometimes self-indulgent, this solo is caught between Webb's awareness of the audience and his self-interested physical explorations.

Beta Wave Transport induces an odd enthrallment. The measured pace takes him from a childlike obsession with his own body through playing with his green paper prop to a final fetal ball.

In common with many durational artists, Webb uses his art to strive towards a transcendent state: he had talked of wanting to be fully in the moment. This time, he does not sustain it. Like the poets of old, who alternated between ecstatic engagement with their supernatural muse and periods of less inspired but solid verse, Webb slips in and out of enthusiasm.

A powerful continuation of Webb's ongoing investigation into dance as a trance state, it is a surprising primal and visceral entry in Dance Base's often cerebral programme.