Ronin review – Yukiko Masui’s swordplay choreography is exhilarating in its cut and thrust

Some contemporary dance can make you feel like you need a master’s degree to even enter its zone. Yukiko Masui’s Ronin is not at all of that ilk. Take the kids (the age recommendation is 10+), take your un-arty uncle, take people who are not dance insiders, and they are not going to feel excluded. It’s a show.

It is a show, even so, with its own arcana – samurai swordfighting, anime references, video-gaming – and its own mystique. And running through the switches and jump-cuts of its sundry scenes is the slender thread of some kind of metaphysical quest.

Cher Nicolette Ho is its main character, first seen in ritual preparation for a journey. The stage is physically empty but audiovisually full: all three walls, plus the floor, serve as screens for Barret Hodgson’s immersive digital animations, initially featuring downpours of rain and uprisings of bubbles, then traversing worlds where neon flowers bloom and fish swim through forests, where pathways pixellate, gyrating white cubes wheel through geometric space, and a cold moon merges with a boiling sun. In tandem, Ruth Chan’s soundscore treks from rain on roofs to synthed-up noise, drum-driven beats and, in one memorable scene, a silence that suddenly sounds loud.

Ho sets out into this disorienting universe, where she encounters two other seekers, Nathan Bartman and Jacob Lang, whose roles fluctuate (also disorientingly) between adversary, assistant and companion. If plot and place can be discombobulating, the choreography itself is clean and pacy: fights and face-offs, stalking and chasing, tense advances and nimble tumbles. Most striking is the swordplay, the dancers’ torques and lunges amplified by the long arcs of their swords as they take swipes out of the air. Even without swords, the style leaves its imprint: the moves are sharp-edged, simultaneously fluid and stabbing, sometimes freeze-framed, always poised. It’s an exhilarating effect.

The first act ends with the image of Lang lunging to skewer Ho’s flung-back body while Bartman holds him back. The second act returns to this tableau via a different route, as if offering another take on the same scene. It’s a riveting pivot-point – yet the rest of the act diffuses this focus, bounding off through more assorted quantum leaps. Still, which would you prefer: a story that coheres, or the slayage of three dashing swordspeople slashing away at their simulated universe?

Touring to 23 May