‘Creature’ Is a Sexy, Sensual Dance Performance That Needs More Pizzazz

Within five minutes of Creature, a fear strikes the casual viewer: to paraphrase Peggy Lee’s 1969 pop hit, is that all there is? In other words, will there really be no further dimension to the movie—Asif Kapadia’s filmed adaptation of Akram Khan’s eponymous ballet—than a danced performance, over the course of 90 minutes?

That nagging fear speaks to the fact that Kapadia and Khan have mostly not worked to adapt the choreography for film as a medium but, rather, Kapadia films what is mostly a straight-up staged performance. That dynamic means that the dance puts the spectator at a distance: rather than being drawn in, we are put at a remove, one which makes the story, such as it exists, more difficult to engage with. A more immersive approach—one which reconceived the dance in properly filmic terms—would help to portray the story’s more theatrical elements and the lack of spoken word and easily intuited narrative.

That story begins, promisingly enough, with the flesh: pale skin flecked with smears of grime, on a body part almost unrecognizable which is soon confirmed as the hero’s back, as his neck unfurls, his movement deliberate; his body language is searching and nervous, as he rises, from this fetal crouch, and dances into being. Here, things have already become a smidge more dicey, as the space he is dancing around, though beautifully set-decorated, is clearly a stage. This is a large and sparse rectangle, surrounded by hunks of rough wood—a kind of large wood-cabin, perhaps, conjuring a sense of alienation and remoteness.

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Here, the main man (Jeffrey Cirio)—a beautiful innocent, a hopeful boy-man—seems to discover both himself, and a nearby woman (Erina Takahashi) who is on the verge of death. Sweetly, gently, he coaxes her back to life, in a fine and sensuous dance where he supports her falling body, dipping it, guiding it into gestures that feel human, until her previously inert body has a semblance of vitality again. This is a tender courtship, one that feels in some way shorn of sexuality: there is eroticism between the two, though the relationship between this man and woman feels more rooted in kinship and confraternity.

There are echoes here of Frankenstein, particularly in the suggestion of surrounding cold, recalling the journey of his monster into the icy wilds. Recurring footage of Apollo 11 (one of the film’s only acts of visual superimposition onto the original danced artwork) is interspersed, at least in the early stages of the movie, with a remixed stretch of Richard Nixon’s speech to the astronauts on the moon. The film seems to make a wry enquiry into colonialism, or perhaps into the nature of humanity, as Nixon’s voice repeatedly intones that “the heavens have become a part of man’s world” while the creature seems to discover his body, with a sense of fear and disquiet. Soon, a daunting army invades the stage, dancing a forbidding group choreography that further alienates our protagonist, and weakens the woman. A repeated stylistic element—a rather corny “glitching” of the screen—seems to add to the sense of remoteness here, of glacial abandonment.

Truth be told, many spectators will be at a loss to make out much of a storyline in Creature, where no element of narrative is spoon-fed to you. In fact, it’s fair to say there isn’t much of a story here at all; many ballets have more obvious dramatic beats, more distinguishable storylines, yet Creature focuses instead on feeling and suggestion, being more of a character piece perhaps. Take a (gorgeous) pas de deux that the creature executes with a secondary character, a kindly army figure. In this dance, the creature imitates the other man, learning gestures from him (and perhaps to embrace his own humanity); Khan’s choreography delicately stages this mirroring, until the characters are dancing in synchronicity. The bond between the two is suggested here rather than explicated, and there is pleasure in watching this enquiry into physicality, particularly since Cirio is such a lovely stage presence. A story so reticent, however, would stand to be more visually dynamic in order to underline the dancers’ physicality.

Too often, Kapadia’s filmmaking is little more than nicely dressed filmed theater, roving from side to side along the edges of the stage. Close-ups, seized on the fly from a number of different cameras at different angles, punctuate proceedings, giving a bit more depth to the action—but all too often we return to watching the performance from the sidelines. A virtual fourth wall is thereby erected along the fringes of that theatrical space, distancing us from the action in an occasionally dispiriting way.

Why the play has not been more substantially retooled for cinema is unclear—it would surely have been the work of a few weeks to redesign the choreography to work in tandem with the camera. Take a group dance scene around the halfway mark, where the battalion dance a forbidding number. Kapadia’s camera films this almost exclusively from the front, without framing the entirety of the action. Anybody who recently enjoyed Spielberg’s roving camerawork capturing the school dance in West Side Story, getting in amongst the revelers while still giving a sense of the overall picture, will be at a loss to discover these sometime flat images, which increasingly procure a numbing feeling.

What remains is a singular and sometimes arresting dance piece, intelligently put together, and danced with fervor. As the piece progresses, some of the dance’s own individual strengths carry the film, such as the sense of a world falling apart around the two protagonists, who are thereby thrown together. But more work was surely needed to adapt the choreography for the screen and do justice to Khan’s vision in cinematic terms. As it stands, Kapadia’s film is merely a vehicle, or a servant to the dance, rather than an equal dance partner.

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