Review: ‘Message in a Bottle’ Finds Powerful Dance Moves — and Muddled Messages — within Sting’s Songs – The Village Voice

Last fall, a neighbor accosted me in our building’s elevator to rave about a PBS  “Great Performances” special, in which a group of British dancers told a story using remixed performances of some of Sting’s greatest hits. That program, Message in a Bottle, had been in development for several years. As a stage show it took London by storm in 2019, winning Olivier Award nominations for director/choreographer Kate Prince and her troupe, ZooNation. Advertised as an “extraordinary dance show,” it’s now playing at New York City Center; savvy watchers in the house have suggested that this brief run represents a tryout for a possible move to Broadway. 

Prince and her collaborators — pop icon Sting, musical arranger Alex Lacamoire, and a clutch of British designers, associates, and assistants — have wrangled 27 of Sting’s songs into a story of sorts, an imagined narrative that couldn’t be more timely, about a family displaced by war. The problem is that the songs don’t successfully narrate the particular heartbreaking situation dramatized onstage. One of the most popular, “Every Breath You Take,” originally about a jealous young man stalking his sweetheart, is used here to backdrop a bunch of black-clad guards overseeing an encampment of refugees: “Every step you take, every move you make, I’ll be watching you….” 

What we have here is a rock concert in which live musicians are replaced by a dance troupe.

Prince has taken dance forms — breaking, now celebrating 50 years since its emergence from American Black youth culture, and capoeira, the Brazilian martial art invented by slaves that allowed them to practice fighting while pretending to dance — and given them the full proscenium treatment, with lots of room to stretch out and virtuoso performers who combine street-dance chops with sophisticated ballet and contemporary technique, including dazzling head-spins, hefty guys balancing on one hand, and even-handed partnering of fluent women.  These British artists have reprocessed folk styles and sent them back to us as musical theater, structured as vignettes dramatizing Sting’s repertoire.

But using Sting’s songs to create a tale of refugee resilience — a displaced family dealing with brutal conditions, incarceration, rape, torture, and worse — makes little sense dramatically, since the songs mostly chronicle adolescent romance, male paranoia, and other issues more suitable to the pop vocabulary. Arriving as it does at precisely the moment our land is erupting in protests over conditions facing a group of displaced and war-torn persons — the residents of Gaza — the show speaks to contemporary feeling but it doesn’t do so coherently. The first several numbers are love songs: “Desert Rose,” “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” “Fields of Gold.” The last of these (“Will you stay with me / Will you be my love / Upon the fields of barley / We’ll forget the sun in his jealous sky / As we lie in fields of gold”) is played twice, invoking the bonnie hills of Scotland but not actually speaking to the situation the piece is trying to dramatize. The grimmer aspects of Prince’s vision show up mainly in spectacular projections by Andrzej Goulding: weather maps melt under downpours, chain-link fences topped with barbed wire prevent the multi-racial community from escaping oppression. At one point we hear “Fragile” — “If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one / Drying in the color of the evening sun / Tomorrow’s rain will wash the stains away / But something in our minds will always stay” — while nobody’s feet slip in actual mud or get ripped apart, though fireworks on the cyclorama do mutate into very loud bombs.

The stagecraft is first-rate throughout, and the 24 barefoot dancer/actors acquit themselves irresistibly. One man, clearly suffering from PTSD, shares a vertical bed with shadows and projections of an elusive lover, in a sequence set to “The Bed’s Too Big Without You”: “I can’t sleep with your memory / Dreaming dreams of what used to be.” What we have here is a rock concert in which live musicians are replaced by a dance troupe. The sound is canned, albeit well-engineered. The movement, like the music, is jagged, abrupt, staccato, with the ambiance of a teen dance transformed for the volatile environment of 21th-century Europe and America. (A program note states that “one person is forcibly displaced every two seconds as a result of conflict or persecution,” and that half of the displaced are under 18 years old.) 

The dancers wrangle props to support their moving bodies: slatted boxes are used as chairs and tables, rugs and cushions serve to comfort them. Simple constructions, beautifully illuminated with LED devices that resemble neon, stand in for prisons, offices, and other encampments; the dancers mount and swing from them as if they are playground jungle gyms, against a stunning background of geometric projections. All this beauty, though, is at odds with both the tragic situations they face and with Sting’s lyrics. Sometimes the concept marries a Sting song with the action, and then fragments of Prince’s concept can be located in the music, including in the song “A Thousand Years,” which tells of “A million roads, a million fears / A million suns, ten million years of uncertainty.” But mostly, it’s a stretch. 

The men in the cast get most of the spectacular moves, and the dramaturgy leans heavily on male romantic fear, crisis, and fantasy (the only “narration” is the lyrics, mostly sung by their composer). At the end of the two-act adventure, the packed house rose collectively to cheer. Perhaps they were Sting fans going in, or arts managers looking to make a buck.  ❖

Message in a Bottle
New York City Center
131 West 55th Street
Through May 12

Elizabeth Zimmer has written about dance, theater, and books for the Village Voice and other publications since 1983. She runs writing workshops for students and professionals across the country, has studied many forms of dance, and has taught in the Hollins University MFA dance program.

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