Am I

The problem faced when creating a piece about sex trafficking, especially one not involving words, is how to invoke the atmosphere of victimhood and the setting of the sex industry without crossing the line into either titillation or helpless chaos. This isn't always achieved in Am I, a piece with noble intentions let down by long passages of very literal choreography that do little more than show us the obvious truth: that sex trafficking is both dehumanising and degrading to its victims.

LCP's dance piece, choreographed by Joanna Puchala, starts promisingly. With the aim of blurring the boundary between trafficker and victim, Wayne Wallen begins in a dim, green-lit solo, a hunted quality flashing up and down his limbs as he scratches and swerves. Women appear, hidden behind their hair; a three-headed woman in one case, whose disconnected hands stroke downwards with menacing tenderness. Another stretches and rolls with ambiguous lethargy; is she resigned to her fate? Forced to put on a brave face?

From hereon in, things begin to fray, and the unsettling confrontational edge that infuses the opening is replaced by messy ensemble sequences full of yanking, clutching, whimpering and undressing.

Puchala has gone to lengths to create an authentic aesthetic, but as the women perform in synchronisation for their watching pimp it feels dangerously close to a pornography of subordination. Dance has the power to speak in symbols; recreating verbatim pain and humiliation does no one any good here.