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Locked Down. Locked In. But Living review – Covid anxieties take shape

Back in June, Huddersfield’s Lawrence Batley theatre commissioned three choreographers to turn their responses to life’s sudden restrictions and anxieties into new pieces of dance. The results, filmed throughout the theatre building, give shape to both familiar feelings and flights of the imagination.

The opener, Locked Down, is by Jordan James Bridge, known as a performer with Wayne McGregor, but here choreographing for dancer Izzac Carroll. It starts in the theatre’s dark, red-lit basement, with androgynous movement and an intensity of focus. The dance is both intimate and extrovert, with the camera picking up intriguing details: the twist of a wrist or fluttering, black-painted fingernails. Bridge is a young choreographer with the beginnings of a strong voice.

Northern Ballet’s Daniel de Andrade gets around Covid rules by cloning his four dancers in the edit to create an ensemble of up to 12. In Locked In, he plays with other film tricks, such as running scenes backwards to uncanny effect – there’s a good one where the dancers are scrambling along the corridors, a bundle of bodies going in all directions, a vibrant contrast to the politeness of some of the choreography. The music mix is eclectic, from Ólafur Arnalds to Corsican polyphony. You wonder where you are sometimes, much like in lockdown when you don’t know what day it is. The stand-out solo comes from Mlindi Kulashe, who engages with Arvo Pärt’s Fratres as if it’s not music that’s been used a million times before, with urgency, his body pouncing on the rhythm, and with pleading arms and eyes, fully invested.

In the triple bill’s finale, But Living, Gary Clarke has great fun with the concept, taking an Alice in Wonderland approach. Rather than wonderland, dancer Gavin Coward is trapped in the theatre with a white rabbit (Gary Hartley Farrar). With the style of a silent movie and a richly melodramatic soundtrack in Nigel Clarke’s Dial H for Hitchcock, played by the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, the camera catches, and creates, claustrophobia. Coward cycles through lethargy, restless energy and febrile frustration, eating and drinking stuff he shouldn’t and endlessly fiddling with the remote control. Clarke is always good at connecting with the audience, and despite the depths of fantasy, you can’t help but empathise.