Oona Doherty: Leather Jacket review – dancers delight in their hard sweaty work

Bold Tendencies, London
Slaps, beats and bounces underscore the unified collective pleasure of sharing a rhythm in this world premiere of the singular choreographer’s latest piece

Can it be a bit of a curse for an artist to knock it out of the park right at the start of their career? Choreographer Oona Doherty’s astonishing early works, Hope Hunt and Hard to be Soft, marked her as an unique (urgent, unfiltered) voice moving in uncharted territory. Her output since has been more variable, although she’s always utterly her own woman.

Doherty’s last major piece, Specky Clark, was high concept. This new world premiere, Leather Jacket, feels the opposite, not quite enough concept. (I know, you can’t win.) The leather jackets of the title are being worn by eight dancers. Under bright fluorescent lights in the concrete space of Bold Tendencies – the Peckham multi-storey car park turned theatre – the dancers all slap one foot to the ground in a heavy thud, and again, and again, keeping a determined rhythm. It’s a thrill to be up close as foot slaps turn to thigh slaps, then bounces, then into Doherty’s own skewed kind of Irish step dance, matching the shift from electronic score to Cormac Begley’s experimental Irish folk music. (The dancers have shed the jackets by now; they’re just in their underwear.)
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