Marco da Silva Ferreira: F*cking Future review – The sound of the moment calls for protest through concerts | Dance

toLast year, four choreographers competed for the Turner Prize, the Rose International Dance Prize, for dance’s answer to the £40,000 prize. One of these finalists was Portuguese choreographer Marco da Silva Ferreira. He didn’t win, but he certainly distinguished himself as the voice of the moment. His work bears echoes of those of Hofesh Schechter and Sharon Eyal, but with a clear agenda: protest through parties; Activity meets collective dances. Beautiful, sexy, isolated people, danceable tunes, a somewhat 3am atmosphere and a conviction that the world should be a better place.

Da Silva Ferreira’s dance is like simple music: small cells of movement, repetitive, gradually shifting and transforming. A staggered step, a brace, a muscular torso crackle, a slippery moonwalk, and so on. Eight dancers are in perfect unison, but there’s no sense that they’re robots — they’re real, sweaty humans in shiny pants and chain jackets with red makeup smeared under their eyes. This piece, F*cking Future, is all about slow building. The kind that might seem boring until you tune into it and live it with them, beat it with the rhythm.

It’s the opposite of dance school that shows us everything you can do: it’s against instant gratification, and there’s no quick dopamine hit. It slowly amplifies, raising the energy inch by inch, moving to the next level. They started chanting the song of resistance: “We are the ghosts you tried to kill!”

You think – or I thought – that we are heading towards a dizzying climax: finally the dam will break, the banks will burst, and the rhythms will fall. You can see the style and verve of these dancers, not least da Silva Ferreira himself, bursting against the constraints of the work’s structure. This will be a hell of a catharsis.

Except this never happens. Momentum is sucked back into the group. Is this the policy of resistance? They don’t give us an easy way out, and they bow down to group harmony. One way a choreographer can work is to act like a DJ – rather than just shaping the dancers’ movements, it’s about shaping the energy in the room over the course of an hour or so, through bodies, sound, light and movement. This piece is subtly intoxicating. These dancers, pushed to their limits by choreography that is a feat of intense concentration not to mention physical fitness, end up in a state of ecstatic exhaustion. But are they taking us along the way?