Vista turns perception itself into choreography, one dancer at a time.
VISTA had my attention from the very first second it began, and it never once let go.
“Stunned,” was all I could say to the friend next to me when the lights came on for interval. We had just sat in utter silence for half an hour, jaws gently dropped.
VISTA
- 22 JUL – 1 AUG
- Tickets here
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For the full length of the performance, every shift of light, every swell and hush of sound, every movement pulled something out of me; tears, chills, a kind of quiet disbelief I hadn’t expected contemporary dance to ignite in me.
Each of the six dancers truly carried their own private language for moving through the world of VISTA, and yet they stayed tethered to one another exactly as the choreography demanded; a group that felt cohesive and fractured in the same breath, rarely moving as one, even within a single passage.
Some were fierce and coiled with strength. Others moved like water, boneless and amazingly fluid. A few were jagged, all edges and tension, while others carried a heaviness of pure heart. I found myself constantly moving between them, wanting to devour every movement and emotion on the one stage as they moved around, between, under and over each other, running in from the sides in different pairings and units.
Every one of them was a master of their craft, fully inside the emotion of it all, I couldn’t look away if I’d wanted to.
The structure itself is what makes VISTA so quietly ingenious. Act One is monochrome and razor-precise, all discipline and restraint. Act Two takes the same bones; the same motifs, the same duets, and cracks them open into colour and noise and feeling.
Watching familiar shapes return transformed, wilder, more exposed, was genuinely moving in a way that’s hard to articulate, with many of the moves we saw in the first half now in reverse, with different dancers doing different parts. By the time the second half hit, with its eerie, overwhelming chattering voices and blown-open colour palette, I was stunned into stillness in my seat.
Underneath the spectacle is something more thoughtful: a meditation on how perception splits depending on where you’re standing, how the same moment can fracture into entirely different truths. Robin Fox’s score and Bosco Shaw’s lighting don’t just accompany that idea, they embody it.
This isn’t a show you purely watch so much as one you feel happen to you. I’d see it again in a heartbeat.
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