Tell Me

Tell Me opens beneath a suspended red cube which, like its subject, slowly lifts and spins faster and faster above the stage, ominously watching and waiting to descend on the movement below.

Grace and Michael, unafraid and unaware, enter in a loving and entwining embrace, unaware in their unity that the world is about to be torn apart.

But the brightness does not last. Grace is soon trapped inside a red frame, as messages from her mother arrive and the doctor brings the diagnosis: HIV. And the cube, still hovering above, begins to embody more concrete meaning. Open spaces become closed, shut off, trapped and isolated. The production builds an entire world around this simple red object, before pulling us beyond it and into the hedonistic 1980s, where Michael and the other dancers move through a world of sex, pleasure and freedom that is already being invaded by something they cannot yet see.

News bulletins intrude rudely on the pop music and parties, puncturing the indulgence. Once more white and bright give way to red and dark, and the movement follows: bodies that had been dancing together twist, invert and turn against the space around them. What begins as an exuberant physical world becomes increasingly dangerous. The movement carries much of the story here, making the shift from pleasure to fear and isolation legible without needing explanation.

And as black wrap physically binds the stage and entangles both characters and cube in a sweaty embrace, the pop music dissolves into heavy breathing and simulated sex. Grace watches from the shadows. The physicality is often striking, although it can become relentless as the piece pushes further into its darker world.

This show’s use of music is worthy of praise. 80s medleys bring the zeitgeist of the decade onto the stage and sit against electronic-synth beats which carry an urgent and distressing tone. Gradually, as the texture of the music deteriorates, bodies are left in only the sounds of breath and darkness. It’s here that Michael, in his mad, defeated desperation, pleads to his mum over the phone: “I didn't choose this.”

Isolation becomes an apparent theme in the climax as the cube becomes wrapped in plastic and filled with a thick smoke that billows into hair-raising red sirens around the stage. Grace becomes a prisoner, as searching spotlights penetrate her quarantine. Is she escaping the disease, or the wrath of its gaze?

As the show closes, the red turns to blue. The cure has arrived. Death becomes health, becomes hope, becomes survival. But the red cube remains in the background, sitting amongst a chorus of verbatim survival notes from a disease that destroyed so many young lives in the mid-80s. The movement gets the story there, even if at times it does rather a lot of the telling.

Tell Me by Sadiq Ali Company. Credit Alberto Santos Bellido.