Lullaby dance review: Life on the ward
Jasmin Vardimon’s surreal hospital-set dance drama finds beauty, humour and heartbreak in the liminal space between life and death
Dance, with its ability to probe the vulnerabilities, beauty and power of the body, makes a fitting form with which to explore the strange atmosphere of hospitals. UK-based choreographer Jasmin Vardimon’s Lullaby is set in an A&E ward and turns 23 this year. It’s been updated with a new cast and fresh scenarios (there’s even a nod towards AI’s use in modern medicine) but the piece’s surrealism and the way it captures those discombobulating emotions which hospitals can stir up, make it feel timeless.
Small vignettes unfold inside Guy Bar-Amotz’s set of shifting cubicle curtains. A cluster of people in a waiting room make a frantic but strangely harmonious ensemble as they synchronise gestures of waiting (both patiently and impatiently). A man and a woman vie for control of a plastic-coated mattress sandwiched between them, unable to connect with one another through its sticky, shiny surface. Two almost identical stories of devastation and resilience unfold in side-by-side beds. The acrobatic demands of Vardimon’s choreography are more than met by the dancers, who fire into leaps, throws and punch-ups, and breathe nuance into the unsettling blend of humans and machines, such as in a passage where an automaton doll invites patients to rate their pain from one to ten.
The music choices also lean toward uncanny, teasing us with familiar tunes in unfamiliar renditions: a soft-voiced cover of Abba’s ‘The Winner Takes It All’ or a whistled version of Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’. Like the best short stories, Lullaby demonstrates how surrealism can illuminate the complexity of truth. Towards the end, a child’s voiceover describes her mother’s affair, with the ‘lover’ who ignites the father’s jealousy turning out to be cancer. It’s heartbreaking and beautifully conceived. Occupying the liminal spaces between narrative and surrealism, dance and theatre, life and death, Jasmin Vardimon has created a modern classic.
Lullaby was reviewed at King’s Theatre, Edinburgh.