Mah Hunt @ Zoo Southside

On the Prowl...

Feature by Gareth K Vile | 12 Aug 2011

Twenty years ago, there was only ballet and folk dance in the Czech Republic. Dot 504 are the country's first professional dance company outside of these traditions, and the tightly crafted Mah Hunt follows up their previous, intense, Fringe successes.

Earlier peices have been emotionally violent ensemble blow-outs: this duet is almost gentle, despite imagining a post-catastrophe world where animals have disappeared, and humans indulge their desire to hunt on each other. Episodic and suggestive, it is, by turns, intimate and spectacular. A wry humour softens both the ecological warning - if we destroy our environment, there is nothing left but to destroy ourselves - and the rough battles between the dancers.

The moods shift, as the hunter becomes the hunted, and the dancers adapt the characteristics of different animals, lending an atmosphere of magical transformation: the compassionate ending is the inevitable conclusion to the frantic, exhausting battles between man and woman.

Throughout Mah Hunt, Dot 504 expose the fragile line between sensual intimacy and erotic violence: in a world without animals, the hunt becomes a game of mutual seduction and destruction. Ravishing, disorientating, imaginative, captivating, Mah Hunt reflects the complexities of human relationships and the shadow cast by our evolutionary heritage.

 

Zoo Southside, 14 - 20 Aug 2011, 2pm

http://www.dot504.cz