Review: Lost Dog’s “Paradise Lost (lies unopened beside me)” – dance and a god I could believe in

This time the lights don’t go down, we don’t get a warning to ‘prepare’, but that makes sense because we also don’t get a fourth wall. We are immediately immersed in the action, as it is signature in Lost Dog’s productions. We get a little excerpt from Milton’s poem which gives name to the show and then go into “a slight paraphrase of the original” as lone performer Sharif Afifi informs us. And of course we are already laughing.

We get a god who climbs a rope, fights with the rigging, creates heaven, gets annoyed at the singing of the angels, falls in love with Lucifer, and has a crisis because a “glossy magazine” tells him that he should be having kids. This “domestic” portrait, and Eve’s creation and “feminine” dance later on in the show jarred a bit for me – they present a vision of the female that doesn’t seem to have the usual nuance that this company works with. God eventually becomes pregnant and has a child with Lucifer. The falling out – quite literally – between them is of epic proportions. And throughout this we are gifted with Lost Dog’s usual dry humour – mini paper angels falling from the sky, “giant boulders” which are in fact chickpeas…

From here we get a double timeline of god’s trials after his initial failure, and Ben Duke’s journey into fatherhood. This is the parallel that drew Duke (Lost Dog’s Artistic Director and the work’s original performer) to the story – that god is kind of an incompetent father (as he put it in the Q&A after the show). They both lose nerve and temper at points, and we are given a show that is less about the divine and very much about being human.

Lost Dog in ‘PARADISE LOST’ starring Sharif Afifi photo by Zoe Manders (5)

Lost Dog in ‘PARADISE LOST’ starring Sharif Afifi photo by Zoe Manders 2

I had to stop myself from running home to hug my daughter when Afifi was going through a list of anxiety-inducing things that could happen to his child. Thankfully, that dry humour came in again, and a shark came to save us from ourselves and remind us that most of those things are generally quite unlikely. Similarly, at the end of the show we are gripped by the terror of a father waiting to see if his baby is ok, but thankfully the protagonist’s kid is ok, and so is, kind of, humanity. Sometimes we take a while to ‘get’ what is going on in the scenes, but that only makes it more exciting and more rewarding when we are guided through it after a while.

As usual, Duke’s wit and creativity show clearly through his engagement with dance both in the movement itself and the thinking around it. The movement is a little bit less integrated in this production, but we get pearls like the naïveté of thinking that you can earn a living out of contemporary dance, or the moment when Afifi ‘misses his cue’ and is unable to show us an amazing dance that would have answered questions about what it is to be human, identity and masculinity “as only dance can”.

The sarcasm fills the room and the beautiful building that is the Battersea Arts Centre, but it doesn’t quite feel cynical. Throughout this production the directors seem to take all my fears and regrets, as a mother and a contemporary dance person, and both air them out and make a joke of them, and I cannot help but laugh along. After all, like god says to us after heaven is destroyed, we “just have to start again”. As a firm atheist, this is a dance and a god I could believe in.

Lucía Piquero

Lucía Piquero Álvarez was born in Asturias, Spain, where she trained in Classical Ballet and read for a BSc in Psychology. She moved to London where she trained in contemporary dance (LCDS), also getting an MA in Choreography (Middlesex University). Lucía has been an independent dancer and choreographer since 2007, her choreographies have been presented internationally and she has been commissioned by choreographic centres, national companies and festivals.

She was lecturer and head of the Dance Studies Department at the University of Malta, and Senior Lecturer at Dance City (Newcastle), and is currently lecturing at Trinity Laban and English National Ballet School. She completed her PhD at the University of Roehampton. Her main research interest is on embodied emotion and cognition in dance, she has presented in conferences and directed workshops and practice research projects internationally, and published articles and chapters in diverse platforms as well as her own monograph.