Robert Tanitch reviews Pilobolus’ Shadowland at Peacock Theatre, London WC2
If you are looking for something to take the whole family to, Shadowland could well be the answer. I took a 13-year-old who enjoyed the show enormously. You will have to act quickly. It closes 30 March.
Pilobolus is an American modern dance company with a huge following world-wide. They have been going since the early 1970’s and they take their name from a backyard fungus which constantly changes its shape.
Shadowland, which is being performed in the UK for the first time, is a mix of shadow act, dance, concert and circus. Its main and distinctive feature is the silhouette and the 90-minute performance, straight through without an interval, relies for its effect and appeal on a series of projected and constantly changing images on multiple moving careens.
A teenage girl dreams she has been turned into a dog and has strange encounters with people, animals and things. The story-line is not important. It is what the company does and the sculptural shapes they achieve singly and as a group.
Everything they create – a giant hand, an elephant, a camel, a centaur, cacti, worms, a taxi ride, a plane, Tower Bridge, even the rocky landscape – is done with the torsos and limbs of twelve acrobatic dancers and their silhouettes.
The visuals are often striking. The high spot is the curtain call which reprises many of the images we have seen at speed and shows how they were achieved. The coordination is amazing and so, too, is the sheer number of dancers involved in producing any one sculptural shape.
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