Review: FIVE DAYS IN THE SUN - Emanuel Gat Dance (Sadler's Wells)

Review by Sam Woodward

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Silk billows through the air in the opening moments of FIVE DAYS IN THE SUN, extending the dancers’ silhouettes and catching the light as they move. It is a striking introduction to Emanuel Gat’s latest work, which arrived at Sadler’s Wells last night for its UK premiere. The dancers’ movement is initially slow and contained, giving audiences time to appreciate the spectacle in front of them before the dancers erupt into frenetic energy. Mahler’s Fifth Symphony gives that shift in energy an enormous dramatic force. The opening to this new dance production is immediately absorbing, and sets a high expectation for what is to follow.

First presented at French festival Montpellier Danse in June of this year, this 70-minute contemporary work brings together a newly assembled ensemble of twelve international dancers. Gat builds its five acts around the first four movements of Mahler’s symphony, using Leonard Bernstein’s recording with the Wiener Philharmoniker alongside additional sound material of his own. The music is an enormous part of the evening’s appeal, even when the connections between the five acts are harder to grasp.

It is easy to call dancing effortless when you are the one watching it from a comfortable seat in the auditorium. Here, the physical exertion is obvious, and seeing how much work the performers put into the movement makes their commitment all the more impressive. Geremia Cappagli stands out among these talented dancers for his expressive movement, which repeatedly drew my attention. The calmer moments offer a welcome change of pace from the more forceful passages, and Gat’s decision to let the choreography move independently of the music often works well. Once or twice, however, dancers arrive unevenly in an apparently shared phrase, or a sequence misses the impact it has been building towards. These are brief lapses, but noticeable enough to take me out of the performance.

One of Gat’s cleverest choices is to leave the dancers visible at the back of the stage for most of the performance. They change costumes, watch their colleagues, emerge as an ensemble or come forward one by one to perform, recalling the atmosphere of a rehearsal room or audition hall. Watching them watch each other becomes part of the pleasure. The sense of people taking turns and paying attention to one another gives these passages a surprising informality. I often found my attention drawn to those watching, even while the dancers at the front remained captivating and charged with emotion. These moments make the company’s relationships easier to engage with.

VICHER’s costumes, designed by Inez Wicher, are exquisite. The billowing, luxurious silk is a pleasure to watch in its own right, while the changing silhouettes allow the same body to take on very different appearances. There is real intelligence in how the costumes and performances play with gender and sexuality, and the moments of bodily sensuality that emerge are smartly judged. The use of colour is equally successful, with fabric and lighting repeatedly working together to create some of the evening’s most memorable images.

Gat’s lighting is phenomenal, and the triumph of the entire evening. Responsible for the scenography as well as the choreography, Gat transforms the stage through colour and light with a clarity that is sometimes missing elsewhere in the production. Its relationship with the movement and music is both beautiful and dramatic, giving the changes in mood an immediate force. Gat choreographs light with breathtaking imagination. At times, the light comes close to telling a story on its own. I found its progression more convincing than some of the transitions between acts, which makes the unevenness of the choreography all the more frustrating.

Mahler is exceptionally well used. Gat allows the music to shine, and the silences are just as effective, leaving the performers to hold the stage without orchestral support and allowing audiences to really focus on the dancers’ immense talent. A thought-provoking interruption comes through Gat’s additional sound material, with sound design by Frédéric Duru. Children’s laughter and screams fill the room, bringing the sense of a playground into a performance shaped by such grand music. Alongside the dancers’ playful antics, these familiar sounds change how we hear the symphony around them. It is a clever shift in perspective, and one that I found particularly engaging.

Elsewhere, I found myself working much harder to understand how the acts belonged together. Contemporary dance can be abstract and open to interpretation while still giving an audience threads of connection to follow. Here, I struggled to find those threads across the five acts. Individual passages hold the attention, but the piece rarely makes clear how one encounter or image develops into the next. By the later sections, I was questioning what the evening was building towards, and what thought or experience I might take away. As the confusion grew, the performance began to lose me.

Mahler’s Adagietto brings a magical lightness to the closing minutes. Bodies lie on the ground, with one figure appearing to try to escape, and I wondered whether this was an image of death or separation. There is room for ambiguity here, but the lack of connection to the earlier acts made it difficult to feel the weight of this final scene. Once again, the music communicated more clearly than the movement.

FIVE DAYS IN THE SUN has exquisite costumes, extraordinary lighting and dancers who give it everything. Its best moments are a pleasure to watch, but across seventy minutes the work struggles to sustain the engagement of its opening. I left with vivid memories of the silk, the colour and the performers watching one another. I was much less clear about how its five acts were meant to belong together.

FIVE DAYS IN THE SUN plays at Sadler’s Wells Theatre until 4 November. Tickets from https://www.sadlerswells.com/whats-on/emanuel-gat-dance-five-days-in-the-sun/#book 

Photos by Julia Gat.