Marco da Silva Ferreira: F*cking Future review – voice of the moment calls for protest through partying

With a 3am aloofly sexy vibe, the Portuguese choreographer’s slow build is subtly intoxicating – while its intensity will leave you craving more

Last year, for dance’s answer to the Turner prize, the Rose international dance prize, four choreographers competed for £40,000. One of those finalists was the Portuguese choreographer Marco da Silva Ferreira. He didn’t win, but he definitely marked himself out as an of-the-moment voice. His work has echoes of Hofesh Shechter and Sharon Eyal, but with its own clear agenda: protest through partying; activism meets choreographic collectivism; aloofly sexy, beautiful people, clubby beats, a somewhat 3am vibe and a conviction that the world should be a better place.

Da Silva Ferreira’s dance is like minimalist music: small cells of movement, repeated, gradually shift and morph. A slinking step, a strut, the pop of a muscular torso, a slippery moonwalk, etc, etc. Eight dancers are in unison, but there’s no sense of them being automatons – they’re real, sweaty humans in shiny trousers and chainmail vests with red makeup smeared under their eyes. This piece, F*cking Future, is all about the slow build. The kind that might seem boring till you tune in and live it with them, beat by beat.

It’s the opposite of the show-us-everything-you-can-do school of dance: it’s anti-instant gratification, no quick dopamine hit. It slowly swells, jacking the energy up inch by inch, moving to the next plane. They start chanting a song of resistance: “We are the ghosts you tried to kill!”

You think – or I thought – that we’re heading for an amazing climax: finally the dam will break, the banks will burst, the beat will drop. You can see the style and verve of these dancers, not least Da Silva Ferreira himself, bursting against the confinement of the work’s structure. This will be one hell of a catharsis.

Except that never quite happens. The momentum absorbs back into the group. Is this the politics of resistance at play? Not giving us the easy out, bowing to the harmony of the group. One way a choreographer can work is much like a DJ – rather than just being about shaping dancers’ movements, it’s about shaping the energy in the room across the course of an hour or so, through bodies, sound, light and motion. This piece is subtly intoxicating; these dancers, pushed to their limits by choreography that is a feat of intense concentration not to mention aerobic fitness, end in a state of ecstatic exhaustion. But do they take us with them all the way?

• At Sadler’s Wells East, London, until 6 June