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Driven is a new piece by Motionhouse's artistic director Kevin Finnan, premiered a month ago at Warwick Arts Centre. Its theme is the constant rush of modern everyday life, the way in which we don't have time to consider what we're doing, and how a tragic event can stop us in our tracks and drag us back to reality, however unpleasant that may be.

The piece fuses film and dance with aerial work to show us the frenetic lives of the five dancers. We see them at home, at work at their unseen computer screens, and in a nightclub, all speeding this way and that, twisting and turning as they're caught up in the high-speed dance of life. At one point a girl mops the floor, and, on film we look down from above and see that she has written "help" in the suds. Help it is that they all need; help to escape to a calmer world. This mad race towards nowhere is halted by the death of one of the two men, (the excellent Junior Cunningham), which we witness on film as a car with headlights glaring rushes towards him (and us) and knocks him down.

There is a long sequence beside his corpse on a trolley, and the whole next section consists of the cast's varied reactions to the death. Their pain, and also a kind of elation, is expressed by the dancers now flying on wires, sometimes out above the front row of the audience. It looks dangerous and is very effective, and one has to admire the way they manage to avoid mid-air collisions. Later a kind of order is achieved to a movement from a Bach violin concerto - a surprising and contrasting insertion - but by the end life seems to have speeded up again.

Whether all this works depends on whether you like to be shown the techniques by which theatrical effects are achieved. In the flying section all the hooks, wires, straps and belts are picked out by the stage lighting, so that they become part of the work. They look like instruments of torture, and perhaps, in this very clever piece, that's exactly what they are.

Driven will be at The Corn Exchange, Newbury, on April 26.

9:45am Thursday 8th March 2007

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