(One Cartridge Place, 27 April 2022)
The minimal requirement for a production with no words is that its actors be good-looking and its choreography be good. The Burnt City fails to clear this bar—in London, of all places.
The show felt fabricated. The creators chose not to draw on a prototypical world for inspiration and instead attempted to collate a new world from from disparate images conjured by what must have been a committee. The final product did not quite compile. In large open spaces, the feeling was more akin to being at a rock concert, with a clear barrier between the public and the performers, rather than being a witness transplanted to another world.
In the production in which a dancer’s body is the expressive medium, some actors were dressed in bizarre silicone half-body suits, whose only effect was to conceal and deform the actors’ physique. The show lacked passion, pace, and purpose.
By having exiled the production from the city proper, the creators appear to have also traded the urbanity for suburbanity. After the production, a public street leading away from the venue was blocked---with no credible reason and with questionable legal basis. Surgical masks under plastic masks were required but not supplied, and the plastic masks were unceremoniously confiscated after the production by the characters who made no attempt to inhabit a character. A VIP lounge was available but was not clearly marked, would not serve even a complementary Coke, and was situated away from where a band performed, with the said band, which dabbled in the genre that had no connection to the spirit of the proceedings, leaving right before the public had a chance to settle at their tables and listen.
