Laba by choreographer Mohamed Yusuf Boss is an energetic ‘journey through no man’s land’ ★★★★☆

One won the BNG Bank Dance Prize 2022 with a lively group ritual about cherishing your roots. The other – a duo – was honored with the Club Guy & Roni Partner Award out of dozens of entries during the Rotterdam International Duet Choreography Competition in 2018. Now, with the support of Club Guy & Roni in Groningen, these promising choreographic talents have made two group works, which are entitled Club Guy & Roni Invites tour the Netherlands together, after a premiere at the Jonge Harten festival. What is striking is the attention the makers pay to the choreographic depiction of theatrical situations with main characters, without telling a specific story.

Bee Postcards from a Better Place by Anna Jacobs and Hanna van der Meer (the duo Lunatics and Poets), five performers grow into frightened characters in a quite disturbing setting. You can read anger, aggression, shame in their motor skills. Here, (war) violence seems to have shaken the bottom of their mutual trust. Four haunting giant dresses dominate the scene. Sometimes their sleeves flutter, sometimes they literally grab the three women and two men. Do the ghost dresses symbolize demons from the past? For the long arm of those in power? Or for the dark sides of human characters?

It’s a pity that you have to guess too much about what’s going on here, while the angular and expressive motor skills are executed so sharply. Loving hugs already betray a germ of frustration. And characters drag chairs and tables to a homely setting, to aggressively force each other out of the tent with the same furniture. A steadily wandering woman takes center stage – a powerful performance by Tatiana Spiewak – but whether it is about her dark memories, or about the evil wrought by a civil war, as fragments of noise on the tape and the green-brown costumes suggest, that may be a piece become clearer.

In Lab (Somali for the number ‘two’) by the Dutch-Somali choreographer Mohamed Yusuf Boss things are a lot more cheerful. Here the five unfold a large blue canvas into a sea, a starry sky and a tent roof. Together they ‘migrate’ from one ‘place’ to another and seem to feel at home dancing everywhere, except when one dancer briefly breaks away from the collective. Boss refers to the nomadic history of his native Somaliland, where he left part of his family and which is not officially recognized as a state.

During their energetic ‘journey through no man’s land’, the dancers carry everything with them. First they stomp around rhythmically in white costumes, then they splash across the floor under a vault of heaven, wrapped in billowing tunics full of airy puffed sleeves. Finally, they nestle under that tent cloth to warm each other up with quilted costumes made of colorful mats. That group scene ends abruptly, as if the end has been cut off. But the joint capacity of a vibrant collective is in Lab well felt.