REFLECTION: e.ID: A Fugue stages our digital identity crisis through vigorous choreography

{JSON.stringify(article.attachments[0], null, 2)} --> Opening at the State Theatre in Pretoria this week, Louise Coetzer’s e.ID: A Fugue is as astonishing as it is bewildering. And as much as it’s an enlivening, exhilarating performance, it also feels like an elegy for a disappearing species, our final death knell concocted by a cabal of suited plutocrats.

It begins with wild wind, churned up by half a dozen mobile, industrial-strength fans that furiously blast air across the performance space, where the dancers – svelte, taut, athletic, statuesque – stand poised on the tips of their toes for what feels like a cruel period of time.

Not only balancing on their toes, but, as though engaged in some torturous yoga punishment, also moving, in tiny increments, delicately pulsing up and down to a soundtrack that’s a convulsion of metallic snaps and cracks and pings.

Complicating this expression of physical concentration, each of the dancers is also holding in some way a large water-filled plastic bag, like the ones used to convey goldfish from the pet store to your home aquarium.

It goes on long enough that, in the audience, I feel my own calves and feet begin to ache, a sensation of physical empathy, knowing what the body experiences, how pain starts and then builds into something unendurable. And all this time, the cool-headed dancers in rapt concentration, their focus unwavering, the metallic grind of the music creeping under the skin.

The new production from Darkroom Contemporary Dance Theatre takes you on journey that feels epic, and is inundated with physical and psychic curiosities, brutal existential questions and deeply affecting dancing.

And yet, should you find yourself grappling for meaning, attempting to get answers from each of its successive episodes, or if you try to piece together a coherent narrative, you might be fighting a losing battle. Perhaps even a self-defeating one, since the meaning is the dancing itself, the dancers’ bodies and what they put themselves through – a kind of physical manifestation of these strange times in which meaning seems to always be slipping through our fingers.

I watched this new work in a near-complete form at the dance company’s new rehearsal studio in Gardens, Cape Town, just a few days before they travelled to Gauteng where the show will start a three-city tour – first Pretoria, then Berlin, and finally Arnhem in the Netherlands. It was, to say the least, a masterful integration of edgy music, compelling choreography and frankly phenomenal performances from its dancers.

These five hard-working, skilled athlete-artists – Gemma Trehearn, Rian Jansen, Tamsyn Pretorius, Gala Winkler and Aphiwe Sodlamba – came to the piece already bruised, sore and presumably exhausted from what I could only imagine to be hundreds of hours of rehearsal. None of what they did was easy, and what was demanded of them was, as already mentioned, a lot.

And yet there was barely a hint of strain or struggle. They danced like absolute machines.