Motionhouse delivers a visceral, breathtaking exploration of humanity’s instinct for connection and survival in an age of anxiety.
What we have with Hidden – and it is quite miraculous – is a visceral ode to the urgent force of life.
Whatever may imperil us – rogue AI, climate change, a bomb – choreographer Kevin Finnan and his Motionhouse ensemble tell us that the elemental yearning for connection will heave us through to the other side, even if we have to begin again.
Through broken shapes finding form, the choreography declares that the primeval essence will re-assert itself.
If you find yourself with eyes damp during this presentation and wondering why, it is because the dancers have wormed past rational thought to reach the instinctive lizard brain beneath.
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But back to the start. The set (Simon Dormon) on the vast stage of Sadler’s Wells East is dressed with two screens creating digital backdrops. We are in green and pleasant England – in parks, in Tube stations, in starter homes in commuter towns.
The dancers negotiate with their environment, some at ease, some in love, many in states of distress and fracture. Something is wrong. The music is electronica and soaring strings (Tim Dickinson and Sophy Smith) creating a sense of tension.
The tension breaks. Calamity strikes.
On the bars, on the ropes
The screens are stripped away to become wedge climbing frames with their own choreography – walls, prisons, a roof or a parapet. We will see parkour and gymnastics and pole dancing on these bars.
The seven-strong ensemble is likewise stripped of all modernity. They manage to undo their bodies and find what lies beneath.
In one exquisite scene two men are puzzled by light and each other, fearful but inquisitive, beginning that tortured negotiation anew.
Another astounding sequence has two women trapped in plastic-like placentas. They rip and tear at their weird prisons, spilling and gushing into the world.
Yearning is made flesh, the need for community becomes a thrilling and disfiguring electric surge through the body. Neurons in the void make connections and create sparks and memories.
It is dirty, it is gorgeous.
In the second act, those climbing frames become a giant slope, the seven of them alternately rising and slipping, conquering and succumbing, striving for the pinnacle.
They will bend, but they will not break.
Hidden is transcendent; a deeply moving response to this age of anxiety.
Hidden is presented at Sadler’s Wells East until 31 October 2026.
This review first appeared in The Spy In The Stalls.