At first glance the title of Hey Stop!!! — performed by the Spring Dance Collective — seems to be a nice touch as a way of grabbing attention through the overwhelming sea of Fringe shows. Ironically, throughout the show the performers never stop, beginning to end there is a constant flow of movement, of interaction with each other and with the space, and the juxtaposition with the title reflects exactly what the show describes itself as trying to do; to portray the often indescribable negativity that come with social fears and anxieties.
Despite the total lack of vocals and reliance solely on physical expression and dance, the message of Hey Stop!!! as a representation of distorted perceptions within interpersonal relationships never ceases to be crystal clear. The performers take feelings of inadequacy, alienation, and loneliness and translate them into physical expressions. Everything in the performance feels perfectly strategic, from the dim and almost meditative lighting, to the black clothes worn by the performers and their beautiful contrast to white worn in one sequence representing the social butterfly.
The emotions instilled in the audience through the tactical choreography, sound, and light act as a stunning testament to the way that emotion can be created through experimenting with movement. In a sequence where one of the performers traps themselves in a sheet pulled tight by the dancers around them, a growing sense of discomfort is caused in watching them struggle. The performance feels at the same time calming, both in the naturalness of the dancers’ relationships with each other and in the intimacy in the way that emotions are shared between performers and audience.
What Hey Stop!!! achieves is having their audience fixate on their physical movements, and at the same removing the image of themselves as people. Instead, it feels as if they are literal embodiments of the emotions expressed. Even to refer it as dance would feel like an inability to do the show justice. To paint the picture of something inanimate through purely physical is a challenge Hey Stop!!! rises to perfectly. Leaving the show, despite the feelings of negativity the performance attempts to depict, I felt both utterly mesmerised by the beauty of the choreography and deeply understood in the way the performers speak to the fact that emotions can still be felt even without the ability to put them into words.
Image courtesy of Mallory Pruitt, provided to The Student as press material.