Preview: Just For Show, National Theatre, London
Why dance belongs in the theatre
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Your support makes all the difference."Unless a piece of work is story-based, any conversation about it will die pretty quickly," he says. "My big question always is: how relevant is this to my life?"
His pieces have never balked at probing the darker seam of modern society, from the serial killer Dennis Nilsen in 1988's Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men, to homophobia in 1995's Enter Achilles. Increasingly, Newson has integrated choreography with dialogue to do this. His new piece, Just For Show, an investigation into the many ways people lie and deceive both themselves and other people, is heavily text based.
Work that combines language and movement has been a slow but increasingly powerful force in the dramatic arts in the last decade. Under Nick Hytner, who commissioned Just For Show, the National Theatre has been actively pursuing a policy that encourages work that overturns conventional definitions. Nick Starr, the National's executive director, believes the National Theatre is a natural home for a company such as DV8. "We find that our audiences are hungry for the sort of virtuoso stagecraft Newson brings to the stage," he says. "They connect with our policy - of pushing back the boundaries of what theatre means."
Newson agrees. "Nick Hytner is interested in finding richer forms of theatre, just as I am interested in finding richer forms of movement."
10-19 November (020-7452 3000; www.nt-online.org)
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