Draw from Within review – Rambert's gripping horror show for jumpy times

It’s hard these days not to start reading the current crisis into everything you see. Here’s a flirting couple, she’s coy but definitely in control, when suddenly the walls disappear around her, she’s abandoned and isolated, then trapped between rope barriers pulled across the stage.

Trapped, isolated, the rug pulled from beneath our feet. Draw from Within is not coronavirus choreography but there’s certainly room for interpretation. This premiere is Rambert’s post-lockdown comeback, a live-streamed performance specially designed for an online audience by Belgian choreographer and film-maker Wim Vandekeybus.

Filmed in Rambert’s own studios, there’s plenty of shadowy atmosphere. Opening in a dimly lit stairwell with flickering flames, the glint of a knife blade, gloved hands holding a bloody crimson heart – the tone is set for a nightmarish ritual. And there are more horror tropes: a smiling young girl appearing from nowhere, innocent yet knowing; a woman lost in empty corridors; a sinister hospital; that bad dream where you find yourself the star of the show but you don’t know the script.

That’s only part of the ever-shifting texture, though. Draw from Within is not a piece of dance theatre to be pinned down, swerving through scenes, ideas, songs and backdrops; birth, ageing, fear, vulnerability, connection and social critique. Then there are the swells of pure physicality, dancers rolling across the floor and flinging themselves across the stage in leaps and barrel turns, that’s classic Vandekeybus, a soundtrack of chaotic guitars and a commotion of bodies. But there’s elegant choreography too, and the company have clearly been keeping their instruments finely tuned. Liam Francis catches the eye with some lithe and liquid shapes.

The cinematography is effective, the camera an active observer, sometimes caught up among the dancers. And the times when the scenery gives way, and what seems like it was solid and stable crumbles into something else, that works especially well on film where you can be tricked into thinking you’re seeing the whole picture much more than onstage. But for all the darkness, ultimately there’s hope, as dancer Daniel Davidson implores: “We’re still young, we have a lifetime ahead of us, there’s plenty of time.”