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10 Soldiers review – Rosie Kay drills dancers for the battlefield

To prepare for her original look at army life, the award-winning 5 Soldiers, Rosie Kay took part in battle exercises embedded with an infantry battalion. This is no artist’s invention of the military – her research goes deep. Ten years since that premiere, the expanded version, 10 Soldiers, is another potent work.

The main addition in this larger-scale version is a first act that takes our protagonists from civilians to soldiers; from frantic star jumps, out of breath and all over the place, to a streamlined section carrying out intricately rhythmic drills. There’s much pleasure in watching unison manoeuvres click into place, knees high and arms swung with swagger. The life of a soldier is already full of choreography, and Kay works with that to make dance that feels rooted in reality.

There are interesting moments in training when the group of soldiers could be mistaken for prisoners, or when an exercise appears to involve stabbing a soldier in the guts and then carrying him to safety. It suggests a kind of doublethink you have to practise about the value of a body, depending on whose side it’s on. It’s a job that requires a cold efficiency in combat alongside an unbelievable gallantry, to risk one’s own life for a comrade. The recruits practise battlefield heroics to the epic sound of Ride of the Valkyries – as used in Apocalypse Now, movie myths playing in our young soldiers’ minds. There’s nothing but respect in Kay’s depiction but there’s definitely a richness in her reading.

What Kay is great at portraying is the waiting. The soldiers don’t go to war till the last third of the show, and they alleviate the anticipation and the intensity of the job with laddish brags and japes, drinking, doing stripper dancing to Katy Perry’s Firework and simmering, lustful thoughts about the new female recruit – a hopeful display of desire from hip-hop dancer Emma Houston is a particularly good addition.

All of this is handled with a sense of authenticity, character, humour and thoughtfulness. Some dance works transfer better to screen than others, and it’s not always easy to say why. This could easily be a five-star show in the flesh.

Available on YouTube until 19 August.