Colossus review – masses of dancers, masses of fun in a show that goes whoosh!

2 hours ago 7

Mass movement can have a walloping impact. Whether in military parades or Olympic opening ceremonies, Busby Berkeley routines or the corps de ballet, a vast number of bodies chiming together in precise formation equals automatic wow factor.

Australian choreographer Stephanie Lake knows it, and her piece Colossus, which was originally made in 2018, has been performed all over the world. Clips from it went viral online. Now it has a UK premiere with a cast of 60 students from the London Contemporary Dance School – enough of them to fill the stage of the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Just the physical power of so many dancers is impressive. When they all run at once, if you’re close enough to the stage, you feel the air whoosh by as if they’re the blades of a giant fan. Seeing those bodies become an architecture bigger than themselves, or tracking small movements running through the group, timed to the millisecond like a glorified Mexican wave, is instantly satisfying.

But this is more than a contemporary dance Rockettes. Across the tight 50 minutes of the show, Lake looks at all the different things a mass of bodies can mean. A melée, a mob, a team or an audience, a flock of subjects being dictated to by an imperious conductor, a gang chasing down their victim. There is an ongoing question about where the power is (the answer switches throughout), interspersed with dancers moving beautifully as one. Bodies laid in a circle for example, pulse like the diaphragm of a speaker.

The well-drilled dancers are on point; it’s a real feat of logistics with so many limbs to get in the right place at the right moment, and the complex order of, say, six factions all dancing out their own syncopated rhythms at the same time. Lake thoroughly investigates the possibilities, with surprises everywhere. Inevitably you compare her with other choreographers who work with bodies en masse, such as Crystal Pite: Colossus doesn’t have the richness of language, emotion or dramatic arc that Pite manages, but it’s a very watchable, readable, enjoyable and impressively performed piece.