Marco da Silva Ferreira: F * cking Future review – the current statement calls for protests through the parties | Dancing

Lyear, dance’s answer to the Turner prize, the Rose International Dance Awardfour artists competed for £40,000. One of the latter was the Portuguese composer Marco da Silva Ferreira. He didn’t win, but he established himself as an instant voice. His work is similar to Hofesh Shechter and Sharon Eyal, but with his own clear agenda: protest through parties; activism meets choreographic collectivism; promiscuous, beautiful people, clubby beats, 3am vibes and a conviction that the world should be a better place.

Da Silva Ferreira’s dance is like a small music: small cells moving, repeating, moving slowly and morph. Steep steps, stret, pop of the muscular torso, slippery moonwalk, etc, etc. The eight dancers get along, but there’s no sense of them being automatons – they’re real people, sweating in shiny pants and maillots with red eye makeup. This section, F*cking Futureeverything builds slowly. A genre that may seem boring until you sing and live with it, beat and beat.

It’s different from the we-anything-you-can-do dance school show: it’s the opposite of instant gratification, no dopamine rush. It grows slowly, lifting the force up inch by inch, to another plane. He starts singing a protest song: “We are the ghosts you tried to kill!”

You think – or I think – that we are going to a wonderful climax: finally the dam will break, the banks will burst, the pulse will go down. You can see the shapes and forms of these dancers, not least Da Silva Ferreira himself, exploding against the closed structure of the work. This is going to be one hell of catharsis.

Except it doesn’t really happen. Speed ​​returns to the team. Is this the politics of resistance? Not giving us easy, bowing to group unity. One of the ways that an artist can work is as a DJ – instead of just creating the movements of the dancers, he changes the energy in the room for an hour or more, through bodies, sound, light and movement. This piece is subtly intoxicating; these dancers, pushed to their limits by choreography which is a very interesting activity not to mention aerobic exercise, end up in a state of euphoric exhaustion. But does it take us all the way?