Venus. Wiltons Music Hall.

“Contemporary dance and narrative not always the best of friends” one of the characters tells us at the outset of Venus, much the most satisfying of the four works that comprise Impermanence Dance Theatre’s production at Wilton’s Music Hall. The comment is to some extent ironic given that Venus does actually have an evident narrative thread, something manifestly lacking in the two other performance components, Cosmic Yoghurt and Enemy of the Stars. The fourth piece, Feral, a composition of video, stills, prose, and music also lacks a storyline, but at least offers recognisable compilation of climate crisis motifs to connect with.

Venus tell the story, with much dramatic licence, of suffragette Mary Richardson. Her 1914 protest against the imprisonment of co-protester Emmeline Pankhurst involves taking a meat-chopper to the National Gallery’s Velázquez masterpiece, The Rokeby Venus. The resulting prison sentence leads to a hunger strike and brutal force-feeding. Beguiled by the siren song of ‘30s political extremism, in the particularly unpalatable form of Oswald Mosely and wife Diana, Richardson joins the British Union of Fascists. Her leadership of the organisation’s women’s section is conveniently excised from Richardson’s 1953 memoirs.

For reasons that make little sense, but certainly afford an opportunity for humour and some meta-theatrical contemplation on narrative momentum, Mary finds herself “ripping a hole in the fabric of time and space”.  Her destination is a kind of louche Weimer-republic style cabaret, hosted by the founder of the Italian futurist movement, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (in the form of a joyously camp Alessandro Marzotto Levy). The performers, clad in sinister gestapo-black suits trimmed with silver highlights, deliver the narrative through a fusion of contemporary dance, back projections, voiceover, physical comedy and lip-synch. Writer Peter Clements’ mash-up is supported by a sublime soundtrack from composer Li Yilei that blends original music with, amongst other things, Wagner, and the Horst Wessel Song. A haunting recording of Diana Mosely justifying her fascination with fascist blackshirts to Desert Island Disc’s Sue Lawley, set to a spiky two-man dance, provides a more acidic edge to proceedings.

Venus’ final duet between Richardson (in the form Impermanence co-Director Roseanna Anderson) and Pankhurst (Mayowa Ogunnaike) sees the two suffragettes dance past one another, almost as if the other performer were not there. Very occasionally the same dynamic feels true for the synthesis of so many genres in the piece. There are times when elements fail to cohere or transmit a unified message.  Nevertheless, though hard to pigeonhole, this is a constantly watchable and periodically very funny hour.

British-born surrealist painter and novelist Leonora Carrington forms the subject of the much shorter Cosmic Yoghurt. The three-performer dance piece aims to capture the energy and imagination of her works, to mixed effect. A voiceover recording of an obviously elderly Carrington sees the irritable artist complain of an interviewer’s question, “you’re trying to intellectualise something and you’re wasting your time”.  It is sage advice in approaching this piece because not an awful lot makes sense here; the evocation of feelings seems to be its primary concern. The performers begin the piece in the kind of pearled tiara and lacey, flowing white dresses one associates with Great Expectations’ Miss Haversham, although without holes for arms. This leaves them pirouetting like penguins for a while, before stripping down to sequinned hotpants. Nick Hart’s music, heavy on dreamy clarinet and piano, gives the piece some welcome direction.

More satisfying is the two-man Enemy of the Stars, adaptation from Wyndham Lewis’s pre-war play of the same name. Lewis famously said even he did not know what the play was about, which leaves choreographer Joshua Ben-Tovim with something of a challenge. Thankfully Kip Johnson and Kennedy Jr. Muntanga are remarkably talented and bring a powerful sense of foreboding into their performances. There is a tense, alluring, almost incendiary physicality about the way they work together. Benjamin Oliver’s atonal music has a mechanical vibe that adds to the dark feel of the work.

Feral sees climate activist and writer George Monbiot musing on how “our memories have been wiped as clean as the land”, against a changing video backdrop of beaches, wind turbines, dead birds, and burning household appliances. It is familiar albeit inventively packaged pallet of climate crisis imagery, given added urgency by evocative music from Hollie Harding.

Directors: Roseanna Anderson & Joshua Ben-Tovim