Page 258 - Guildhall Coverage Book 2020-21

In a year of isolation that’s left us craving connection with others, here comes a show

all about the untameable, youthful urge to gather, dance and lose yourself in music. To
party, whatever it takes.

Escaping “small rooms, anxiety, silence”, a group of dancers are called back to a club.
“It’s a risk,” says the club’s house Mother (Justice Ritchie), although for more complex
reasons than the obvious.

Pod was co-created by director Jamie Bradley and choreographer Vicki Igbokwe
of Uchenna Dance, and devised with the cast of final-year acting students at Guildhall
School. It’s an achievement to be putting on a live-streamed, full-scale performance
during lockdown. When it looks like the clubbers in Pod are overly fond of their
personal space, well, that’s social distancing for you, but it doesn’t make much
difference to the effect.

For Pod’s protagonists, partying is serious business, from the philosophising doorman
to Zachary Nachbar-Seckel’s drag persona summoned into being like a spirit. Igbokwe
gets everyone dancing in convincing fashion: the fierce queen, the sexy girl, the
dramatic dancer, the on-the-spot bop. The movement’s more naturalistic than the
script, which comes with a dose of lecturing: on the neuroscience of house music; on
reclaiming one’s sexuality by wearing a skintight catsuit; on the importance of paying
tribute to the people who invented the art – in this case the dance form waacking,
developed in LA gay clubs in the 1970s.

Namechecks for pioneering house DJs Frankie Knuckles and Marshall Jefferson come
alongside monologues on the lives of orcas, mammals who, like us, gather for pleasure,
bonding and social interaction, their familial “pods” mirroring the nightclub family. But
from the microdramas of the dancefloor, the intimacies played out in pulsating
darkness, or the strip-lit confessional of the ladies’ loos, the play takes a swerve into
more sensational territory, and ultimately questions how real that connection with your
clubbing family is. The strong cast manage to hold it all together, the alluring Golden
(Aoife Gaston), New Girl (Umi Myers), slowly revealing herself as the evening
progresses, and Ritchie’s Mother, the mysterious, troubled heart of the party.

Available online until 2 December.