Review: Blood, Sweat & Tears, Northern Stage
by David Whetstone, The Journal
The latest highly engaging piece from balletLORENT expresses the joys and stresses of the first-time parent.
In the first part the stresses are to the fore with the thrilled but anxious young parents, danced by Philippa White and Gavin Coward, like cats on a hot tin roof.
They balance precariously on a cradle and grapple fitfully on a double bed (it’s no surprise to see Chris Kernaghan, a British wrestling champ, among the credits).
In a short passage before the interval the exhausted parents find slumber – and nightmares. Grotesquely, the bed ‘gives birth’ to a stream of puppet babies while a pair of gangling creatures – Gwen Berwick and Meritxell Pan Cabo on all fours, as in an earlier work, Angelmoth – strut onstage and envelope them.
After the interval the joys are uppermost. The previously ominous music of :zoviet*france: becomes pastoral and, in a lovely scene, the seven dancers whirl beneath two glitter balls.
Joy, tiredness and comedy combine as the puppet babies, now on their feet, toddle across the stage like a military column, each assisted by one of the dancers. Sometimes one baby can seem like a dozen.
Overhead throughout hangs a giant hour glass, the sand running away as if to signal, rightly, that nothing lasts forever, least of all this.
