‘Dredge’ // The Anchor Theatre Company

‘Dredge’ was evocative.

‘Dredge’—an evocative, intense and engaging interpretive dance experience that asks some extremely important questions about life and existence. ‘Dredge’ is an experimental dance work developed by Femmural with support from The Anchor Theatre Company. 

This latest work by Femurral poses some very important questions about existence, the nature of the self and the conflict between the inner-self and the greater collective. 

Femurral’s new work is highly ambitious, as it tries to explore the developmental process of a species from the primordial ooze—towards evolution, to post-modern corporate life. 

This work moves seamlessly through stages of life with some quite comic and other extremely thought-provoking scenes.  The initial interaction between, water/mud and the organisms and their discovery of clothing is reminiscent of the obelisk scene in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

Emerging from a primordial ooze, in an almost sacrificial niche in the centre of the stage, seven performers explore the fundamental questions of life; corruption, hope, existential dread and co-operation.

Slowly as the performers begin to explore the world around them; find and interact with each other, primal emotions take hold as they co-operate, fight, love, hate, mourn and slowly lose their connectivity between themselves and the natural world before the audience. 

A couple of times some scenes with spoken dialogue fall a little flat as performers are talking over each other or are facing their back to the audience so some vital points are a little bit hard to understand. But that is most likely the problem of there being too much happening on stage at the one time. The dialogue at times creeps into more sloganism and social media or dating app terms, overshadowing some important points they are trying to get across. 

‘Dredge’ works much better when the audience is more focused on the movement, the expression, the bodies of the performers and their interactions with the space and with each other. 

Jessice Pascoe’s choreography is emotive, charged, sensual and dramatic. The audience is divided on two sides of the stage. Both sides get equal attention as the performers are divided across the space—movements are often mirrored, especially in the more sensual aspects of the performance. 

On stage is a physical embodiment of the best of us; co-operation, connectivity and love; and the ugliness, the cruelty, grind of working in an office, desperation and hope. Avarice, greed and lust struggle between love and hope. 

Both the sound design and music by composer Jack Burmeister and lighting by Tom Vulcan are integral to the shape, development and interpretation of the work. The emotion and tone are set by both between and during transitions. 

The set is one the highlights of the show; with the offertory well where the performers almost act like they are participating in a religious orgy, each time they ascend the stairs to the altar and anoint themselves with the water from the well. There is a clear metaphor for addiction melancholic withdrawal and rage running through this activity.  

The performers have put an extraordinary amount of effort into extremely physically demanding work. Their energy, concentration is disciplined throughout. As the show moves onto darker and more demanding themes, they all push themselves extremely hard. The physicality and enthusiasm of the cast is impressive, no matter if they are doing a solo section or working with the ensemble—at times it’s almost like they are all giant cogs in a machine moving as one whole. 

There are so many ideas running through ‘Dredge’ that some inevitability do not pay off as well as they might if some of the ideas were curtailed slightly.  There is some great material here with some really engaging scenes, but some ideas do not hit as well as others. With so many ideas and so much intensity ‘Dredge’ starts to run out of momentum towards the end, but with any show that runs just short of an hour sometimes a tighter focus or a longer duration would fix up these issues. But overall ‘Dredge’ offers intense performances, some great sequences and an extremely engaging narrative. 

Directed by Brandon Armstrong, ‘Dredge’ runs at Theatre Works until 28th September, 2024. For more visit their website. 

Images by Daniel Rabin