When dance theatre duo Lost Dog (choreographers Ben Duke and Raquel Meseguer) romped to victory in last year’s Place Prize — the dance world’s equivalent of the Turner — they also scooped the audience award nine nights out of 10. The work that won it was It Needs Horses, and it’s easy to see why it was a crowd-pleaser. A slapstick-fuelled skit featuring two clueless circus performers trapped together in the ring, it’s a 20-minute crescendo of barely suppressed mania and cartoon violence that’s like Itchy and Scratchy doing a jazz age cabaret.
There’s obvious comedy in performers being knowingly bad, but more satisfying laughs in the expert timing of dancers Anna Finkel and Christopher Evans, who can make very little, very funny, just by doing it at the right moment. Here is the hollowness of showbiz, with entertainers pimping themselves for a round of applause. As Finkel, a grotesque showgirl with red lipstick slathered round her mouth, gallops around the ring, the similarly titled They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? comes to mind — Horace McCoy’s tale of endurance dance contests in Depression-era America, where desperate hopefuls run themselves into the ground for fame, attention or a few dollars.
Home for Broken Turns is a loose continuation of this story, a “what next?” for the character “Anna”. It’s presented as a work-in-progress, which is another way of saying, “We haven’t had time to finish it yet”, but there’s plenty here to be going on with. The prodigal daughter left behind a poverty-stricken family, it turns out, so this becomes a piece about longing and loss, absence and expectation. Anna, though barely onstage, is the constant presence, her family possessed by her memory, her name intoned by a sister, who vomits and chokes on the repeated two syllables.
Unlike the easy giggles of It Needs Horses, this one’s murkier, unnerving, less pin down-able and ruled by a mad mamma who comes over like a freaky Frida Kahlo. It needs tightening up, and you could lop off 10 minutes near the end, but this could shape up to be an earthy foil to Lost Dog’s prize-winning piece.
It Needs Horses/Home for Broken Turns continues Thurs and Sat (020 7359 4404/ almeida.co.uk).
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