★★★★★ Hubert Essakow: Terra, The Print Room at the Coronet

Hubert Essakow, Terra Review Culture Whisper says ★★★★★

First things first: choreographer Hubert Essakow is magnificently served by a company of five professional dancers and a young girl about whose remarkable performance more later.

They bring to life Essakow’s concept: an exploration of the Earth – Terra – in all its physicality, its promise, comforts and dangers.

The set is a rough wall of what could be clay, at the bottom of which bits of mismatched furniture pile up semi-buried in rubble: a few chairs in varying states of decrepitude, a wardrobe, doors ajar, a floor lamp slightly askew. All share the same bleached clay colour. All look fragile, liable to crumble at any time. This is parched earth, a nod perhaps to ecological concerns.

Through the wardrobe doors comes a woman. Bare breast, long hair cascading down her back, she rises from the ground reaching ever upwards, in a flowing, whirling and crashing dance with elements of ritual or yearning and despair. She could be earth itself, as denoted by a poem, a snatch of which we can now hear: “the earth swirls/and within it heat/and life and forms/change and merge.” She is, perhaps, in the words of the poet, “the silent mother.”

She sets the scene. Slowly other figures start coming in, one by one, gingerly, as if treading into the unknown. That they carry battered suitcases indicates that they are travellers, migrants perhaps, in keeping with Essakow’s preoccupation with contemporary issues such as survival, migration, refuge and belonging.

In one particularly effective scene, they all crowd on a ledge on the wall, which then becomes a flimsy boat, where ever more terrified they sway and cling on, to no avail. They end up on land, exhausted, half-dead. Should we have any doubts as to the reference, snatches of Greek voices are heard: these are, of course, some of the migrants who have been landing on Greek islands over the past year. But then voices in other languages mix in, making these migrants more than just themselves – symbolic, perhaps, of the human condition.

All five dancers – Robert Bridger, Luke Crook, Monique Jonas, Estela Merlos and Benjamin Warbis – bring full commitment to the work and handle Essakow’s choreographic language, a felicitous mix of classical and contemporary dance, with ease and tremendous expressiveness.

The revelation of the night, though, was the young Constance Bowes, who alternates with two other budding dancers in the role of the young girl – the future of mankind? Elegant and possessed of a remarkably assured technique for one so young, she brought a freshness to the piece that must have been meant by Essakow to embody a note of hope for the future.

This is very much a collaborative work, where the designs by Sophie Lachaert and Luc D’Hanis are integral to the piece, as is the hugely effective soundscape from composer Jean-Michel Bernard. And the whole is framed by the rich imagery of the poem Terra, written by Ben Okri for this piece. For a full text of the poem, do buy the programme.

The third and final dance work in a trilogy inspired by the elements, Terra comes in the wake of Flow (water) and Ignis (fire); but stands alone and should be seen.

As indeed should the beguiling space that is the old Coronet Cinema, now being slowly and lovingly restored by the Print Room team.