Whither the self and the machine?: a review of REMACHINE at Sadler’s Wells East
- 1 hour ago
- 3 min read
Sofia Stefani
Today, when salient issues of the mechanical in our environment seem most mired in technological developments without an obvious physical presence, Jefta van Dinther’s choreography in REMACHINE seems to evoke a less striking, industrial sense of the mechanical—humans working with big machines, or the human body as machine. A performance at Sadler’s Wells East choreographed by van Dinther, with music by David Kiers and Anna van Hausswolff, REMACHINE aims to explore ‘the interplay between humans and an inescapable hyper-mechanised environment’. The work progresses in four sections centred around distinct songs, wonderfully sung by the performers over a mesmeric backing track.
The ebb and flow of motion in REMACHINE’s performance catalysed a compelling meditation on human movement that somehow sidelined its ostensible focus on the mechanical. What is motion? To whom or what does motion belong?
The performance opens with six dancers sitting asymmetrically around the edge of a circular, rotating platform. Slowly they spin, at first almost imperceptibly, as the disc turns. The dancers themselves are initially immobile, their feet dragging along the ground, as though waiting…
As a voice begins to sing across the dark stage, the performers slowly shift to life. Their motion at this stage bridges the human—or perhaps more broadly, the organic?—and the mechanical. The dancers flow into action at different rates; the first to ‘awaken’ slides into another figure on the perimeter of the disc, but this bid for human connection is thwarted by the jerky, convincingly mechanical movements of the other. Motion here belongs to the mechanical disc, the human performers, and to some external force that seems to animate certain mechanical motions.
Eventually all performers awake into their human motion: a choral keening coincides with the dancers tentatively yet determinedly coming to life, suddenly pulling, pushing, working to drive the motion of their platform. The vocalisation throughout this dance reminds me that the vibrations of the vocal cords and sound itself, too, are forms of motion.
REMACHINE has beautiful elements. The expansiveness of the dancers’ voices and increasing fluidity of their movement make the opening of the performance feel like springtime—an awakening (a feeling reinforced by the later squirming of performers around the stage, reminiscent of worms in soil). I am particularly moved by a section of the dance in which performers fall from the disc in almost total darkness, only to cling to its underside, illuminated by warm footlights below the platform. Bodies slide around the stage as though in orbit; each performer belongs to a larger system—neutrons orbiting an atomic core, celestial bodies spinning through space. This, too, makes me think of motion that exists on the microscopic scale, and on the cosmic.
REMACHINE misses its mark for me by sidelining the mechanical in its evocation of the expansive, the collective, and the cosmic, lacking a strong climactic moment to crystallize tension between organic movement and a ‘hyper’-mechanised environment. It remains unclear whether the ‘RE’ of REMACHINE suggests a rejection of, or relationship with, the machine. Though van Dinther’s choreography features a segment in which performers seemingly evolve the ability to walk, but ‘glitch’ back into the jerky movements of automata, it is a sense of physical labour—a theme of van Dinther’s work—rather than of the mechanical that is most palpable. The performers’ heavy breathing becomes audible through their mic setup, and they pull at heavy ropes in the final steps of the dance, but the mechanical feels marginal and limited to jerky motions in its representation.
Though provoking reflection on motion, the humanity and physicality of the dance and song in REMACHINE beg the piece’s central question of the “interplay” of the human and the mechanical. (Action around this theme, taking place on a rotating platform, also reminded me of a more refined version of the current choreography for ‘Chant’ in Hadestown, where five dancers move laboriously in sync on a circular rotating platform, evoking industrial work—not my favourite.) The question of motion arises again at the close of the performance—where does motion belong in technology, and how will human motion persist in the face of evolutions in the mechanical from physical machine to the incorporeal? REMACHINE suggests tensions between self and machine in the present, but leaves the potential future relationship of human and machine unaddressed. In the end, the performers face away from each other, singing a version of this question—‘will we fall’—into the unanswering auditorium.
