This was a visually stunning event that started as a film and turned to dance after about quarter of an hour before reverting briefly to film towards the end. The film by Kibwe Tavares showed two refugees washed up on an island - fully dressed and seemingly with a magical box - a memory box. It was beautiful if somewhat confusing (or as the ROH put it, fantastical) to watch, projected across the full size of the front of the stage. Gradually, the group of Rambert dancers was revealed and they took over the action. The choreography by Sharon Eyal was extraordinary and to me felt like looking at movement with a strobe - yet there was no strobe. After about 45 minutes the film came back - projected on the rear of the stage and the dancers left. This revealed a gunman killing the girls' grandmother, thereby explaining their fleeing.
The critics reviews were generally an unfavourable two stars, based on the lack of cohesion between the dance and film. This seemed a fair point but each of the two inputs - plus the music by Ori Lichtik and GAIKA - was sufficiently extraordinary to make it a very worthwhile 65 minutes.
The ROH website had a comprehensive synopsis of the piece that explained how the dance and film knitted together with the same characters but this was far from obvious without such explanation.
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