by In the middle of a minimal stage, the set designer Jacob Hughes placed a single room. It is a cube separated from the outside world; A refuge, an escape or maybe a trap. It effectively sucks her attention, like David, the protagonist in James Baldwin’s room from 1956, Giovanni’s room, and what happens here explodes his life.
Literary adjustments in dance are full of pitfalls, predominantly how to express the complexity and specificity of thousands of words only through movement. “There are no mother -in -law in ballet,” said George Balanchine. Here they are aunts: there is no way that the woman is in red David’s aunt (unless they read the synopsis, which is recommended), but maybe it doesn’t matter. Aunt Ellen’s disapproval is what dance can do through her superior gait and her repellent wrist.
There are a lot that is said solely by bodies in this new retelling by Phoenix Dance Theater and the artistic director of the company, Marcus Jarrell Willis. The path in the opening scene moves David (Aaron Chaplin) as if his body is not entirely under his control and almost stumbles, a short form for the physical urge that does it from the course when he hits the good -looking bartender Giovanni (Tony Polo). There is the dance between the two men, which deals with nerves and restraint and then the twilight certainty of a connection. With hunger and tenderness. There is an urgency that pushes the movement throughout, the pulse of the nightlife of a city, the club scenes cleverly threaded with styles’ writings that look like in the 1920s in the 2020s – Willis brings a currency and colloquial language into its choreography.
There is a nice craft: the opening of Akt II – snapshots by David and Giovanni’s relationship between power outages, the tension, especially when life outside of Giovanni’s room – is very effective. But it feels like there are depths and details of Baldwin’s text that are not more illuminated, sometimes the different textures of fear and fear, hatred and self -hatred. And there is a claustrophobia in Marc Strobel’s layered score that becomes grille. The gang rose to create an “atmosphere” as if it did not trust that the dance could speak for itself.
• at Dundee Rep, March 12; Northern Stage, Newcastle, 19th to 20th March; Birmingham Rep, May 28th; Liverpool Playhouse, June 5; and Sadlers Wells East, London, June 11th to 14th
