This year’s version of En Route is a sunny and sensory stroll compared to 2021’s dramatic Iliad in torrential rain.
Guiding audience members into a state of mindfulness from the outset, Protein’s latest promenade around Woolwich’s suburban edges felt a little more gentle and ‘workshoppy’ in nature.
Ushered on by a friendly dancer, and thereafter the soulful thwang of a saxophone, our group of polite English types made tentative attempts to touch, smell, listen and inhale the green space by St George’s Garrison barracks, stepping through the split trunk of a tree in varying degrees of wild abandon.
Our dancer-companion was soon joined by other luminous performers responding to the elements, buildings and waves of sound floating from an exuberant brass band.
The experience really moved out of workshop territory when all participant groups congregated inside the church’s esoteric ruins. Watching non-professional and veteran performers sing sonorously and unselfconsciously in a bombed-out church was a profound experience, evoking a real sense of timelessness, made more poignant by the openness and vulnerability of the performers.
Throughout the piece, community performers and professionals alike wear their roles with an attitude of service… enabling their rambling audience towards the possibility of connection to people and place. This would be moving in itself in any scenery, but engaging low and high level choreography, along with explosions of unison, helps the piece prevail as a show.
Circus skills play an important role in elevating the performance world above the ordinary with moments of awe—one dancer forms a human arch with his body between walls. Others leverage disused poles for graceful extensions.
Segments of the show resurrected from Protein’s bid at ‘liveness’ post a 2021 pandemic remain. Cries of protest in Beresford Square as supported by local drummers are familiar: "Where are we? We are here! / When are we? We are now!"
Elements of light-touch environmental activism ring more clearly in 2024, as the global sustainability narrative has become an ever bigger cultural trope. The maxim "I stand on what I stand for" has never been such a familiar sentiment.
As En Route Together finds its footing in spaces of denser footfall—the high-rise Thunderer Walk and its neighbouring side streets, watching the reactions of passers by, is a highlight of the journey—most embrace the digression from the everyday with glee; a slender few turn away from it.
En Route Together arrives with crescendo in Arsenal Park—the new cultural quarter of Woolwich, which fronts the river and is surrounded by a heritage of armouries and cannons—a fitting stage for the community drumming group giving rhythmical strength to the performers’ rally to engage.
Getting the audience to truly ‘party’ is one challenge the company could only partially meet. Had this performance toured South America, Africa, Spain, Italy, the level of comfort with rituals of communal movement may have morphed the piece into a different show entirely.
As it is, En Route Together remains a seasonal opportunity for audiences to unlearn their conditioning in the urban and suburban environments that challenge both nature and human nature.