A wonderfully full house immediately settles as the delectable piano nocturnes composed and performed by Lucian Johnson begins. Puffs of haze encased within a circular hanging scrim, blue lit, a figure presents themselves and creates ghostly forms by moving to and from the scrim, playing with distance and proximity to forge illusions of distorted forms and shapes. 

A curious and mesmerising beginning to Lucy Marinkovich’s latest work comprising a series of twelve ‘vignettes of nocturnal dreamscapes’. 

Next a duo, made unique by the ingenious lighting design by Martin Roberts and operated succinctly by Tabitha Littlejohn, warps size and connects us to a family’s ebb and flow of life moving apart and uniting. 

Dissolving in and out of the light, dancers, Marinkovich and Parmenter literally do the same by using simple expressive arms and gestural sequences within the contained scrim space, consequently restricting larger movements but successfully communicating ideas. 

The mood of night time and ‘what lingers in the dark’ was built successfully through numerous hypnotic lighting states. Robert’s inventive connections between Marinkovich’s intentions and alluring states should be applauded, with examples such as, the blue front lit starry night projections, curiously disguised from within Michael Parmenter’s overcoat and the four hazy, blue downlights portraying a misty Parisian street where Parmenter, gently taps out random rhythmic sounds. 

A highlight is Marinkovich’s solo vignette clad in a voluminous white costume with extended arms, side lit, that creates an ever turning, undulating, rippling, whirling Dervish like scene that is transfixing. Following on another vignette explores the space through pin-spots that radiate intensely from the rear of the space towards the audience. Parmenter and Marinkovich explore the space to the side of the light’s paths, gently improvising upper body movements. 

Perhaps, breaking the light wall with their body parts may enhance the overall impact of this section, distorting the body and offering different perspectives of what the lighting state reveals as body parts pass through it. 

Near the end, at last these two accomplished dancers move together, albeit in a linear fashion with a few subtle physical connections. They commanded the space and it was a pleasure to watch them dance together all reflected for us in a curve of mirrors. 

As the work was largely improvised and due to the liberating, fluid nature of improvised movement, perhaps this could ignite more exploratory variations and an increase in dynamics and energies, including a sense of playfulness as two performers together in the dreamscape context. Maybe flirting with and discovering the body, its varying abilities and modes by using the delicious music and lighting ideas in a more adventurous fashion. 

Congratulations to the whole production team who clearly worked creatively and in unity in building this intimate reflection through time on night time escapades.

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Darkness. Languid jazz strikes from the edge of the stage, with only pianist Jeffery Grice’s hands reflected, in the grand piano’s lacquer. His mellow discord is neither safe nor dangerous, both familiar and strange, as the unconscious tends to be.

Initially I’m hungry for more light. Within a tulle curtain, silhouettes leap from background to foreground. They dissolve. Figures fuse and diffuse. They’re vaporous silhouettes. Strategically, light is not given, it’s kept back, it’s deprived us. So initially I’m hungry for more light. Then several acts in, I realise this night is not about dancers per se but about movement and fluidity, and tulle is called on as a dancer in its own right, silk is called on and smoke is called on.

The tulle curtain billows. Are the dancers reaching and stroking it, the fabric their harp, or are silent fans rippling it? Either way, the veil is mesmerising and it’s dancing. When Michael Parmenter is fleetingly lit, his firm, elbow-led movements are agency and determinism against the passive rapture of the tulle’s movements. 

After a fade, Parmenter with his back to us, opens his trench coat to the tulle, illuminating it with sequins or mirrors on his chest, tilting his shoulders this way and that, lighting the tulle. Then he closes his coat, looks over his shoulder at us, and departs, to a few suppressed laughs in the audience. This act is light hearted. People quiet their laugh only because a tone has formed, a night tone of wonder, a lack of visual grip, of trying to make out, of reverence, and this solemnity will persist throughout the performance. 

Another light hearted vignette is Parmenter’s restless tap dancing around a few burrs of light, as though he were waiting for public transport under street lamps. The pad of soft shoes without metal taps is warm percussion. Again Parmenter is toying with clarity, teasing us with a glimpse of ‘dance’ when ‘dance’ is the rarity in a show which pushes us to see movement on a greater scale, and in a wider tempo.

In lyrical moods, in a slice of light, Lucy Marinkovich’s extensions are easeful. And Lighting Designer Martyn Roberts’ lights are often compositions, they are geometric elements throughout the show. 

A moon ghosts across the stage, held aloft by Marinkovich. Its steadiness is a feat of slow precision, an initiation by which a dancer might prove herself. This visual plateau or interlude allows Lucien Johnson’s composition to advance and there are times where the piano notes themselves step forward with a dancer’s poise, notes paced and placed just so.

Marinkovich now wears what we can call a whorl dress. It is she who animates this larger-than-life length of white silk, yet in the course of her whirling it’s as though the silk takes on a life of its own. With batons to lengthen her reach, this silk flies clockwise, dispensing fluid, geometric wonders, slanting, hypnotising, actualising (at high speed) a splash in slow-motion. Here is sculptural poetry.

As the venue fills with dry ice, torches slowly pivot, blinding and engulfing the audience.

When our irises quickly heal and dilate, we are in place for The Night Has A Thousand Eyes’ most intimate passage. Two heads and torsos sharpen, each in their own cone of lit smoke. Fingers block light, and shadows run through beams into the audience, moving over viewers, trickling darkness and light over our heads and shoulders. (I am seated near the back, by chance, where the depth of field for this movement is richest.) The silhouettes lead their movements with their shoulders and with the backs of their hands, unfurling and curling. They stroke the air, playing the light like a harp.

After a fade, Grice ripples into frantic jazz. An overhead light comes to and before standing mirrors, Parmenter and Marinkovich begin their intense pas de deux. A counter duo, they dance back to back. They move fast and pause, bending, unfolding, hooking, in fluid movements. Their reflections participate. The piano storms marcato and crescendos. Marinkovich’s hair flies, her head thrown back. Parmenter walks off. Marinkovich looks over her shoulder.

Piano notes scatter. Parmenter takes the stage in the whorl dress. Roberts enchants the stage with bioluminescence. Viewers murmur at the fireflies racing up the screen of the fabric. Some gasp as the light spills into red.

The Night blacks out. 

The house, a full house, applauds. 

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