Review: Amazing performers dance with grace and feeling

Nothing was quite what it seemed in Nobulus’s stunning production of Out of the Shadow. The ten-strong dance company effortlessly morphed into a bewildering variety of life forms and objects in this creation story with a twist.

Beginning with a single masked figure in white hoodie, we were drawn through time, witnessing evolution from its earliest moments ‘in the shadow’ through to the troubles and terrors of an ‘ordinary guy’ in the present day. There, a love story of sorts emerges, as our modern day hero falls for a girl but is rejected and goes on a self-destructive binge, which risks leading him and us back to ‘the shadow’.

The slightly moralising tone was mitigated by the amazing performances of the dancers. Drawing on the language of urban dance, the show reclaimed a fringe art form and took it to the mainstream. I lost count of how many material objects the dancers became: guitars, vacuum cleaners, exercise machines, tables, motor bikes, trees, machine guns. Not to mention the bacteria, fishes, predators and humanoids on the evolutionary scale. At the emotional heart of the performance is a love story, danced with grace and feeling by the group’s leader Alex Wengler and Eleni Arapaki.

Tuesday’s show was prefaced by a performance from the fifty-strong Freeman Dance Company from Coventry, whose tightly choreographed routine proved, if it needed proving, that extreme youth is no barrier to expression in dance. Wednesday’s performance is led by a group from North Warwickshire and Hinkley College.

Nick Le Mesurier