With a title that evokes the Patrick Marber play about the desire for yet failure to achieve intimacy, Thomas Noone breaks apart its 2-couple dynamic with a six dancer piece, saying that it is the audience in this case that he wants to get closer to.
The public sit on both sides as well as watching from the front. Two-dozen gleaming metal structures offer flimsy frames: nothing to climb on here. An early sequence appears to reference the play directly, female dancers as lascivious predators, a male dancer as the disinterested submissive. And these dynamics of frustration, abandonment or attention-seeking spring up throughout.
The piece emerged of a search for democracy, says Noone, an attempt to replicate the intimacy of the many physical contexts in which the troupe have performed; outdoor and indoor, competing with the elements, the heat, the mosquitoes, the distractions of the street, they nevertheless experienced a closeness with the audience bunched around that is difficult to achieve in a theatre. It was on performing in a circus space that an interest arose in some of its techniques, especially those of clowning, a discipline as perfectionist and individualistic as it appears anarchic. Yet Closer takes a respectful distance, hints at it with gesture and odd socks.
Some magic, some shouting, everything flung out yet fleeting: in the street sequences are short, fragments work best as the attention is quickly drawn away. Closer is bound together by the brilliant score by Jim Pinchen which freewheels from electronica through archetypal ‘carousel’ music to baroque.
