The Observer, 10/01/2010. Luke Jennings reviewing Dance Company at the Place, London.
A man runs round the stage twice and then collapses. A woman bends over him. "Are you all right?" she asks. "I'm fine," the man replies. "If you're fine, why did you do this?" the woman demands, running round the stage twice and then collapsing next to him. A man bends over her. "Are you all right?" he asks. The sequence, which is repeated by all of the 10 performers on stage, is part of Augusto Corrieri's new work Dance Company.
The four men and six women (one of them heavily pregnant, none of them professional dancers) have never met before tonight. Instead, they have rehearsed alone, at home, by watching videos the choreographer has posted on YouTube. After the show, they will go their separate ways; a new cast is assembled for each performance.
The result is awkward, wobbly-tummied and touching, with flashes of heroism as the 10 take it in turns to buzz like bees, essay martial arts poses and strut and grind to Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues". Dance Company is in no sense an aesthetic experience; what it offers is the fleeting, evanescent spectacle of loss of self. Of ego and vanity laid aside in the interest of the project. There's also a sense of optical illusion, of the piece flickering between conflicting ideas. The action is impeccably and fashionably "real" in 21st-century performance art terms, but Corrieri's process is that of the totalitarian state, with each worker ant entrusted only with his own task and denied the broader picture.