Holly Blakey: A Wound with Teeth & Phantom at Queen Elizabeth Hall review: a glinting fever dream

Holly Blakey is a marmite choreographer – her work is raw and dirty. The music is loud, the energy febrile, the moves come at you with dizzying speed.

Her latest double bill pairs a long section from a forthcoming piece with a short, sharp banger. A Wound with Teeth will be part of a full-length work called Lo, and is a response to memory loss. Its uncanny, squirming images might have been retrieved from the mind’s edges – it often feels deliberately awkward and messy.

Gwilym Gold’s soundscore combines sighing vocals, beats that rumble in your gullet and roaring playground sounds. Matthew Josephs’ costumes are an eye-slapping riot – fantastical bits of period dress with kinky cutaways. Chester Hayes opens the piece in a swan-off doublet, a peculiar baby’s bonnet and mustard socks. Other dancers get exaggerated silhouettes, frockcoats, sequins: and all the guys wear pants on the nappy spectrum.

Everyone gets sweaty as Blakey’s choreography takes hold. Much of it is playful – duets like little collisions, a man propelled forward by his own sneeze. Like the costumes, the dance vocabulary feels inventively hurled together – a club kid spin on riverdance, a quick scurry and swish. And Blakey assembles the moves in ferociously rapid transitions – her 10 terrific dancers have to summon chaos with unswerving discipline. Like life, it’s hectic, absorbing but unshaped.

Line dancing and folk steps often pop up in Blakey’s work, as in her previous Cowpuncher series, though the vibe is never a cosy hoedown. Phantom similarly pulls the dancers into tight rows of kicky capers and pile-drive judders – the line-dance structure contains and concentrates the brawling spill of Blakey’s movement. A Wound with Teeth doesn’t hold its dance so tightly, and misses that inspired friction. Whenever an exuberant bop threatens, it fragments again.

Phantom was originally planned as a stage piece, then pivoted to film in pandemic times and has been rethought once more for live performance. It was partly shaped, Blakey says, by her experience of a miscarriage – but though inflected by trauma, you couldn’t call it victim art. A woman may be splayed on the ground and you hear a howl of pain; the next minute she’s somehow upstanding, juddering on the vertical. It’s as resilient as it’s wounded and visceral.

Once again, costumes (by buzzy fashion brand Chopova Lowena) run vivid – a whirl of plaid kilts and bright lurex pelted with bobbles. The movement too begins with an unabashed swagger, all thrashing hair and pectoral jiggle, moves through that fraught suggestion of labour, and hurtles into a final sequence that snaps to an abrupt stop. The lights go up on the audience for much of the short piece – we are as exposed as the dancers are to Blakey’s glinting fever dream.

Southbank Centre, to April 11; southbankcentre.co.uk