Boris Charmatz — 10,000 Gestures review: Mad motions test limits and patience

Boris Charmatz is one part choreographer, one part provocateur, a dancemaker always keen to move beyond the traditional proscenium arch.

In 2015, he turned Tate Modern into a museum of movement; two years ago, ticketholders scrambled out on to the roof of a car park in Stratford.

This weekend he returned to the Turbine Hall for a series of installations, solos and lecture-demonstrations based around 2017’s 10,000 Gestures, a choreographic experiment using 25 dancers in which, over the course of an hour, no move is ever repeated. Watching, it can be tempting to try to keep tabs on the numbers; more interesting still is seeing what Charmatz defines as dance. Because for the Frenchman it really can mean anything.

So amid the more recognisable steps — a jete here, a tour en l’air there — the weird and wacky appears. A girl scratches her bottom and a man in his underwear licks the floor; there’s an overly long bout of screaming, not to mention a mass exodus by the performers into the seating (those wary of audience participation beware).

There’s so much going on that it can be impossible to know where to look or what to think.

The limits of dance may be being tested — but then so too occasionally is the patience.

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