Darren Johnston, Zero Point, dance review: Impressive but alienating

I’ve often thought about Darren Johnston’s work that if you saw it in a club or festival, or even a gallery, you would think it was really effing cool, but there might not be enough choreographic substance to sustain an hour-long theatre performance. And his latest piece, Zero Point, does little to dismiss that question.

Johnston has designed the lighting and projections as well as the movement, and the tech-heavy visual assault is more dominant than the dance, with strobing, eyeball-scorching lights and plumes of smoke clouding the blackness of the stage. The mood is minimal yet claustrophobic, exacerbated by the rumblings of sonic artist Tim Hecker’s soundtrack, vibrating our seats with dark, resonant textures.

This is a show that features some arresting imagery and effects: the white noise image projected onto dancers’ costumes that turns them from humans into CGI; the spinning beams that blur in a circle, trapping a dancer inside a luminous cone; the projections running across the curved set like waves of digital data.

But while the visuals are designed to make a major impact, the dance, inspired by the Japanese form butoh, is the opposite: slow, fluid sequences that are utterly opaque, and just not that interesting (bar a couple of lovely, intriguing and finely articulated solos for ballet dancer Hana Sakai). There’s little for a viewer to grab hold of, few moments of connection between the dancers and no great sense of depth or intention.

Zero Point is impressive but alienating, both visually spectacular and yet very boring to watch.

Until 27 May, Barbican Centre; barbican.org.uk