DONUTS Review - Northern School of Contemporary Dance
 

DONUTS REVIEW

1 March 2022
By Eleni Green

Experience of Extended Play’s latest production

I would compare the experience of watching Jamaal Burkmar’s DONUTS to eating a grapefruit: pleasantly familiar on the outside and zingy when you cut it open. The vague and simple narratives of sitcom TV were combined with stretched movement and invested performances to create an atmosphere of warm and easy nostalgia. Jazz and funk swayed politely with the pink and orange washes of light, stilled only by short scenes of monochrome silence. The story’s pace was guided by individual characters, leaving opportunity for prolonged and overlapping states as well as familial glimpses of performers tucking in the sofa cover or giving a little, I’m good wave. At the centre of the piece, two clavicles, lit from below, pulsed with relentless unpredictability, punctuating the pleasant continuity of unvarying improvisation with affecting gravity. DONUTS carries an energy of domestic yumminess in this salute to the comfort of enduring pop culture.