Deepstaria, Company Wayne McGregor Review 3*
Deepstaria, choreographer Wayne McGregor’s probe into the deep sea and jellyfish, had its UK premiere at Sadler’s Wells
A deepstaria is a type of large jellyfish, about which not much is known. It provides the title and inspiration for choreographer Wayne McGregor’s brand new work for his company. Incidentally, Deepstaria Enigmatica is also the name of a Memphis-based improv jazz band.
Who knew this rare and elusive creature of the deep could so stir the imagination?
If the deepstaria lends its name to McGregor’s new work, it’s the choreographer’s long standing obsession with harnessing and expanding the limits of cutting-edge technology that creates the eerie sensorial world, a mix of deep sea and outer space, which his nine-strong Company Wayne McGregor inhabits.
McGregor employed Vantablack Vision to fashion a sense of unfathomable darkness on stage, and this lifts the dancers out of their earthbound condition into a new, unknowable time-space dimension.
The blackness provides the canvas for Theresa Baumgartner’s constantly shifting sculptural lighting design – surely the most striking and memorable component of Deepstaria.
As the curtain rises, two diagonal shafts of milky light meet at floor level behind a large rectangular panel. It’s a gripping image. Later a wide cone of shimmering light will create the illusion of rain. Half-way through the 70 minutes piece the lights turn a fuzzy red.
Wayne McGregor’s Deepstaria, Company Wayne McGregor (Naia Bautista, Salome Pressac), Laban Theatre, London (2024), Photo: Ravi Deepres
A sequence of blackouts plays with the idea of conceal/reveal, each blackout prefacing new light and movement configurations. The lighting is always interesting, often hypnotic and very very beautiful.
The sound score, too, relies on pioneering techniques: created by sound designer Nicholas Becker and music producer LEXX, it’s reworked live by Bronze AI technology. It deliberately avoids any notion of melody or rhythm, which must be hell to dance to and may be one of the reasons why just occasionally the piece looked under-rehearsed, even though it’s been on tour since its world premiere at the Montpellier Dance Festival last summer.
In any case, although at times the sound suggested the blurry liquid depths of the sea, at others its insistent low industrial droning was headache-inducing.
I left the dancing to last because, despite fleeting moments of great beauty, such as the final scene where the dancers, wearing flimsy Japanese organza, come close to replicating the floaty movement of the deepstaria, McGregor’s characteristic choreography brings nothing new and doesn’t really speak to “our profound relationship with the void and our own mortality”, despite the input of McGregor’s regular dramaturg, Uzma Hameed.
In fact, the whole thing has a strangely distancing effect, and for all that its technological prowess often engages the eye, the heart remains stubbornly detached.
© Teresa Guerreiro
(Banner image credit Wayne McGregor’s Deepstaria, Company Wayne McGregor, Laban Theatre, London (2024), Photo: Ravi Deepres)
Deepstaria is at Sadler’s Wells 27 Feb to 2 March 2025. Details and tickets here