Arts review: Human Locomotion – mesmerising dancing spoiled by too much dry and flat dialogue

Laterna magika’s Human Locomotion is a multimedia dance drama about the 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, and the dancers’ tribute to the eccentric innovator’s stop-motion technique is on target, stunning to look at and incredibly sensual. However, too much of the 80-minute production is taken up by flat dialogue about his discovery of his neglected wife’s love affair. Even the murder of his rival was strangely unengaging.

The theatre group from the Czech Republic mixes dance with drama and is widely lauded for its visual wizardry, something which Muybridge devoted his entire life to (rather than to his wife, who is made out to be giggly and childish here).

He made a device called the Zoopraxiscope that he used to create the first motion pictures. The idea is similar to today’s GIF videos which are also made with showing many still images shown in quick succession. His 1887 Dancing, Waltz, Two Models, shows a man and a woman moving together closely, a private moment captured by the a photographer obsessed with capturing fleeting instances. On stage, pairs of dancers perform a series of fluid duets.

In 1878, Muybridge made one of his best-known series of photographs called The Horse in Motion, which set out to prove that a horse has all four legs in the air at some point while it is galloping. It required an elaborate arrangement that made horses set off triggers on a series of cameras lined up along a racecourse that all had shutters that could close for one-thousandth of a second, made possible by an earlier technological breakthrough by Muybridge.

A group of near-nude female dancers wearing white horse heads stretch, prance and nudge each other in the scene set at the racecourse. Later, the same dancers appear with hoop skirts and little else, their lithe bodies a celebration of the beauty of the human form much in the way that beauty is celebrated in Muybridge’s human studies.

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It is evident again when two well-made male dancers fight on an elevated walkway as the actors playing Muybridge and his wife’s lover look on impassively. The fighters strip down and engage in slow-motion, superbly choreographed combat with some headbutting to provide a spot of light relief.