Wendy Houstoun's Instant Transformations looks at first like a throwback to the 1960s avant-garde: its format a study in anti-dance, its cast a group of highly trained refuseniks. After putting on a blank cassette tape, Houstoun executes a small repertory of twitchy, grungy moves, which are copied and minimally elaborated by her six dancers.
So far, it seems, so predictable. But it doesn't take long to realise that Houstoun's project has its own 21st-century agenda. Her mission is to study the ways in which we transmit information in a world overloaded with the stuff. As the dancers track around the stage, two TV screens turned away from the audience begin playing discordant videos: a spaghetti western, a Scandinavian soap opera. The combination is chaotic, but the dancers, who can see the screens, seem to respond subtly to the action: a burst of gunshot provokes Mark Baldwin to put his hand to his chest with mild affront. Suddenly we view the dance both as choreography and as a game of charades. It is a tribute to the performers' wit that we are not only riveted by their efforts, but are also working to make up stories from the fragments of information they scatter. The truth that we actually spend most of our lives in a comparable state of garbled knowledge is then given funny and shaming demonstration through an expert comic monologue delivered by Tammy Ajorna. Giggling and gabbling like a bad student,she spews out everything she knows about gravity and electricity - which amounts to a sorry stream of half-facts, skewed hypotheses and trite observations. For the show's finale, Houston tunes the televisions to a video of that night's episode of EastEnders. The sound is turned down, but the performers hear it through earphones, so it is left to them (and six volunteers ) to relay the action by miming the characters' gestures and blurting out as much of the dialogue as they can repeat. It's a smart and funny piece of improvisation that portrays perfectly our facility - and our helplessness - as we navigate the modern world, processing vast amounts of material but turning very little of it into sense.
