ReviewInsanity and martial arts: a strong, contrasting double bill from City Contemporary Dance Company

City Contemporary Dance Company ended the year on a high note with a strong double bill featuring one new piece from the company’s own Noel Pong plus one from Korean guest choreographer Kim Jaeduk.

Offering a striking contrast in style and content, each work challenged the dancers in different ways and brought out the best in them to create a high quality, entertaining evening.

Pong’s Nuts’hell (the title is a pun) was inspired by the Rosenhan experiment, which set out to test the validity of psychiatric diagnosis by having sane people admitted to psychiatric hospitals. Despite behaving normally after initial faked symptoms, all were diagnosed as suffering from mental disorders and were only able to secure their release by agreeing with the doctors that they had indeed been insane to begin with.

The question at the heart of Nuts’hell is how do we tell who is sane and who is not? The work begins and ends with a lone patient (an outstanding performance from Bruce Wong), who conducts music no one else can hear – he is joined by others, who interact with each other in various ways. Masks appear suddenly on faces, then are transferred from one person to another (only Wong remains without a mask throughout). Are those wearing masks the ones who are mad or are they the ones pretending that they are?

The work is enhanced by exceptional designs, with Charfi Hung’s ingenious set and Ziv Chun’s video bringing the claustrophobic world the patients inhabit to compelling life. Changing skies are seen through barred windows in the bare brick wall of the hospital and the bars themselves move, with the patients at times seen in front of them, at others caged behind them.

Thought-provoking and often moving, the piece is surprisingly lyrical and gentle in tone, albeit with an underlying sense of darkness and unease.