Six months after it scooped the Olivier Award for best new dance production, Ivan Michael Blackstock’s subterranean fever-dream of a show has arrived at Aviva Studios in Manchester.
Weaving between dance, music and spoken word, this energetic show takes audiences on an unsettling but relentlessly entertaining tour through the perils of navigating identity and mental health as a black man in the UK.
The show has no linear narrative but is rather a dynamic collection of sequences that cumulatively evoke the crushing claustrophobia of stereotypes, social pressures and the ever-present spectre of violence that accompany being black and male.
Explosive dance pieces, pounding music and strobing lights are grounded by spoken word grappling with fatherhood, romantic relationships and a piece (presumably written especially for the run at Factory) which confronts Manchester’s own entanglement with the slave trade.
The production lifts the heaviness of its subject matter with a continually engaging wit, whether through physical comedy, jibes at the audience, or simply the creativity of the imagery. Special mention has to be given to Kanah Flex and his discomfiting ability to contort his body in ways that should really be the reserve of optical illusion.
Traplord is a world of dreams and video games, with the latter projected to form huge, graphic backdrops to the action onstage. Binding these worlds together is Blackstock, who plays the vulnerable, rabbit-eared inhabitant of this fitful labyrinth.
Insistent AI-esque voices seem to suggest that the turmoil that plagues him – the violence, the bravado, the stereotypes or the rejection thereof – centre around a question of what makes ‘a perfect human’.
This feels reductive for show that otherwise seems to grapple with more nuanced questions surrounding the impossibility of exploring personal identity in a world that insistently reduces you to stereotype. A better question might be what it takes to have your humanity recognised at all.
Traplord is showing at Factory International in Manchester till 29th September, for tickets and more information visit factoryinternational.org.
Feature image credit: Camilla Greenwell
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