FOUR STARS
The first of three fascinating dance / physical theatre performances at the Pegasus was Bound, aimed at arousing our awareness of human trafficking, and of the fact that it exists among our own community, not just in Eastern Europe or distant Asia. Anja Meinhardt and her fellow devising performers tell a sad tale with words and movement. Meinhardt plays a young woman who has left her East European village, and her baby girl, to make money for a better life. At first wined and dined in luxury, she has been set up in a sleazy hotel room as a prostitute. Emma Webb is the hotel cleaner, who has also left much behind her to start again, even at this low level. She is witness to Meinhardt’s pain. Mulligan is a mysterious boy trapped in a tiny room which he uses as a trapeze. He swings about but does not speak.
   Meinhardt and Webb play Gareth Cook’s lines of despair and compassion with moving brilliance. It is the best work I have seen from them.
A Strange Wild Song, created by Rhum and Clay Theatre Company, is based on an extra-ordinary episode during World War 1, when a group of war orphans, none of them more than ten years old, lived alone in the desolation of a destroyed village, and formed their own ‘army’, with toy weapons, a cannon and a self-built aeroplane. They were befriended and recorded by a Belgian photographer, Leon Gimpel, and the performers bring his remarkable shots to life.
We see the children in long flashbacks (now brought forwards to World War 2), as, in the present, the grandson of an American soldier who found the children, searches for information with the help of an archaeologist.
Christopher Harrison, Julian Spooner and Matthew Wells are impressive as the children — their actions and posture inspired by the photos.
Chelsea Hotel  is Earthfall’s homage to the legendary New York establishment that housed dozens of artists over the years. Bob Dylan lived there, Dylan Thomas died there, and Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: a Space Odyssey in one of its 200 rooms.
Rather than attempt to bring some of the hotel’s renowned residents to life, the two men and two women of  Earthfall have gone for creating, in dance and action, the slightly sleazy, decadent, druggy atmosphere of the old building. We see violence, love and intoxic-ation in a slow-moving but highly effective perfor-mance, much helped by  the terrific on-stage band.