DRAW FROM WITHIN Wim Vandekeybus

Draw From Within, a Rambert production and choreographed by Wim Vandekeybus, opened at The Lowry’s Lyric Theatre on October 6thand is on for 3 nights. It necessarily started out as a live digital broadcast but is now deservedly on tour. It lasts just over an hour.The programme (such as it was in these Covid times) invited us to take an exhilarating leap into the unknown, and we did.

The performance is a series of linked reveries supposedly inspired by lockdown, some benign and some not so, acted out abstractly with extreme energy by a troupe of 14 dancers to some well chosen musical tracks. We witnessed life events from birth to death and several more between, which took in danse macabre, cadaverousness, an actual birth (cleverly done), and a good poke at contemporary news channels who try to make everything relevant. It was a very good evening.

Things start (and end) with a semi-recital of Conjuring in Heaven, a Ted Hughes poem, and from there things progress through jazz, hip-hop, acrobatics, break dancing and more restrained movement, against the various backing tracks – some of which are haunting. You wonder if the energy can be maintained but it just keeps going.

At times the performance is incomprehensible, but that’s the nature of dreams and nightmares, and the day after you will still be pondering on it. That’s good.

A sneak preview can be found here Click here to watch on Youtube and there are two more nights up for grabs.

Paul Schofield for Canal St Media

Tickets are via here

Published: 7-Oct-2021 (6404)