Choreographer Dan Daw and the dancers from Candoco are celebrating and politicising the dancefloor, looking for freedom and to shake up the system. Over and Over (and Over Again) is set in a club, to a soundtrack of house, drum’n’bass and dubstep, but it’s not exactly a feelgood bop-along, it’s more nuanced, more thoughtful and a bit less fun than that.
Candoco are a long-running integrated company with disabled and non-disabled dancers. We’re told at the outset that anyone can take a break when they need to and that means the audience and also the dancers, especially one who is currently dealing with pain. This is not a forum for pushing through pain, they say. Like so many things Candoco have done, that’s a quietly revolutionary statement, when pushing through pain is usually seen as a given for dancers.
Throughout the show, parallels are drawn between the life of the club and the lives of the performers, with projected titles: struggle, desire, solidarity. There’s a section labelled “chill-out”, with the dancers all cuddled together on a beanbag and a definition flashes up on the backdrop: “rest as an act of resistance”. There is a lot of gentle resistance happening here, resistance to expectations, the sense of doing things on your own terms. Often there’s not that much happening at all. The dancing feels as much for the dancers as the audience, although there’s pleasure watching Annie Edwards as the beats of the music pulse around her body, or the wild streak of the always excellent Temitope Ajose.
The show doesn’t quite work as a rousing call to the dancefloor, but it has some stand-out scenes, such as Maiya Leeke becoming a human disco ball as the spotlight reflects off her mirrored top, arms flung wide, soaking up the vocalist’s insistent lyric: “I want to feel everything!” It captures that paradox of the dancefloor, when you’re completely in your body, in the moment, yet melted into the music, the self having dissolved. When the lights in the club come up, one lone dancer is left behind. James Olivo warms up into a churning, exploratory solo that finally digs deep. It’s a real moment of finding yourself on the dancefloor, with not a disco light in sight.