Release the Hounds closed the 34th edition of Tanztage at Sophiensæle as its final act on 24 and 25 January. A solo by Adam Russell-Jones, this performance takes on the dance marathon as space for an erupting body in crisis.
After the Berlin Senat froze its budget late last year, the Tanztage festival—often presenting emerging choreographers’ first significant works—persevered with limited funding and a curation predominantly of solos. Release the Hounds, a solo without object scenography, epitomises the festival’s constraints and the strength of dance as resistance in the face of deprivation. The solo format, antithetical to social dance as a timeless human ritual, is often the result of conditional scarcity and a blueprint of neoliberal aesthetic individualism in the contemporary West, with these phenomena inextricably entwined in the late-capitalist hellscape of our age. Choreographer and performer Adam Russell-Jones takes this reality on with realist consciousness, representing the working-class dancer in an economic and structural crisis as a body whose labour produces surplus value rather than material or digital products.
A lone figure enters the Sophiensæle’s Festsaal and leans against the rustic back wall that has framed countless dances since the theatre and festival’s 1996 inception. He’s slumped, sequencing through his joints, weighing heavily on the wall in a slow traverse from left to right. A collage of radio and TV advertisements interwoven with throwback tracks audibly fractures the moving horizon of exhaustion, grounding me in the multiplicity of this body—the dancer, worker, and human—accumulating individual and collective memories and recycling histories of struggle.
Russell-Jones gradually peels into the open space, shedding the architectural ‘mountain’ of the wall he seems to have figuratively climbed. His dancing, simple and repetitive in rhythm, reveals complex spiralling sequences and strobing tosses of weight. Years of dedicated training and a spectrum of highly skilled embodiment in professional dance constitute his body. He claims the dance floor like a pen fervently scribbling across a blank page in a stream-of-consciousness trip. Movements reminiscent of the raw intensity of the 90s rave dance style gabber (fast-paced, repetitive), this stripped-down choreography prioritises the visceral immediacy of sensation, immersed in the increasingly pulsating soundscape by Moritz Haas. Intricate phrasing emerges as a natural byproduct rather than a premeditated intention, underscored by the urgent complexities that call this show to life.
The 90s references in the sound and dancing are poignant, evoking the heady days of Berlin post-reunification, grounded in the history of this theatre and three decades of artistic flourishing, which helped establish Berlin as a rare haven where artists could economically survive—now on the brink of collapse. They also gesture to Thatcher’s rule and its impact on Cardiff, where Russell-Jones grew up, marked by social deprivation and the struggles of the working class.
Dripping with sweat from his rigorous and graceful rave, he stands before us, pockets turned out, arms outstretched, empty hands. By dancing, he surrenders and persists: a lone, soft army. Russell-Jones’ work is a loud and subtle testimony to the despair and ecstasy of dancing that can’t, won’t stop, even when lifelines are severed. Dancers are individuals pushing forward in the abyss, with nothing to hold on to but our inexorable movement: salvation and killer.
