The exit signs were switched off and the stalls were in utter darkness. One by one, 15 invisible dancers, their joints attached to tiny spotlights, began to colonise the far end of the hall, forming fresh constellations with every pose. The audience smiled in wonder, like tots at a planetarium.
Tree of Codes, which had its London première at Sadler’s Wells last week, was originally commissioned in 2015 for the Manchester International Festival. It combined the talents of Wayne McGregor, resident choreographer of the Royal Ballet, mixer and DJ Jamie xx and the Danish/Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. The trio took as their text Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, which the American writer made by taking a scalpel to Bruno Schulz’s 1934 short-story collection The Street ofCrocodiles.
On paper, the two-year collaboration by three such fashionable creatives might smell like an old-school Gesamtkunstwerk, but in performance music and dance are totally eclipsed. A serious score and more assertive costuming might have helped restore the balance of power but Jamie xx’s drivetime electronica gives the choreography little to feed on and McGregor’s trademark beige undies are self-effacing to the point of invisibility.
Eliasson’s setting is so mesmerisingly lovely, so consistently surprisingly that it leaves the dazzled brain scrabbling for points of reference. It is not the artist’s first brush with dance. He was part of an award-winning Scandinavian breakdancing crew during the mid-Eighties and his monumental ‘The Weather Project’, a deceptively simple mix of light, smoke and mirrors, supplied the setting for one of Merce Cunningham’s legendary Events in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2003 (a gig that Wayne McGregor saw many times over).
Mirrors are a major player in Tree of Codes, which uses multiple silvered scrims to double the depth of the stage and create myriad reflections of a single figure that recede in an infinity mirror, a flawless corps de ballet of identical poses.
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