Review: Maria Caruso's Incarnation (Theatre Royal Drury Lane)

Review by Sam Waite

⭐️⭐️

In July 2022, Maria Caruso performed her solo show Metamorphosis, garnering acclaim from audiences and critics alike. As the saying goes, she left everything on the stage, including her impulse to create, her ability to connect with new work. If the narration opening her new piece, Incarnation, is to be believed, this is a show born of reconnection to herself, her audience, and to her art. That was her metamorphosis, her transformation into someone new and unknown – this is her new self, her incarnation.

With the curtain rising to find Caruso tied to a chair, limbs bound and mouth taped over, Incarnation establishes itself as a conceptual affair. The revered dancer-choreographer is accompanied by her own voice, dictated letters addressed to “my dearest” which she mimes writing and posting, weaving a loose narrative of lost connection and still-lingering devotion.

Perhaps this storytelling component is too loose, the routines accompanying the correspondence not distinguished enough from one another. A handful of dresses, hung onstage awaiting their moment, continue a theme from Metamorphosis referenced in her pre-recorded opening monologue. Each change of outfit seems to suggest a shift in time, in character, that is sadly absent from the work itself. In its current form, Incarnation’s verbiage and its choreography seem to exist almost coincidentally alongside one another, rather than as parts of a cohesive whole.

Maria Caruso is an undeniably skilled dancer, and her success working as a conceptual creator and performer speaks for itself. Here, her fluidity and flexibility are often on display, her steps smooth and her body undulating triumphantly. The steps themselves, though, quickly become indistinguishable, each routine overly similar to the rest in both its range of motion and its emotional journey. Her narrative comes to a confusing close, the opening entrapment seeming at once to have been both literal and metaphorical, and little in the performance itself suggests growth, implies any change in this fictionalised Maria.

An original score, provided by Ryan Onestak, is consistently enjoyable and well-suited to the modern style favoured by Caruso. One could, perhaps, argue that certain moments would hold more power in silence – early on I caught several heavy breaths from Caruso as her body resisted the power demanded of it, though with music they seemed purely accidental rather than a potentially deliberate, powerful piece of the dancing itself. In paper, Onestak and Caruso are a match made in heaven, her style of movement perfectly in keeping with that of his music. – in practise, they're simply another thing that feels only loosely connected.

Some work comes together because of a need to create, an urgency within the artist that all but requires that this be the next thing they create. The tragedy of art is, unfortunately, that this art’s need to be created doesn't inherently translate into an audience being receptive to the work, or for the urgency of the artist to capture that same spark in others. With Metamorphosis having taken from her all that she felt she had, Maria Caruso found herself again in Incarnation, and that in itself is worth a round of applause.

Maria Caruso’s Incarnation played for two nights at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, on October 2nd and October 3rd

To learn more about Maria Caruso and her various projects visit http://new.bodiography.com/index.cfm?

Photos by Paulo Lieber