Review | The Accountants is a dazzling dance theatre show featuring Chinese and Indian dancers
Performed at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, The Accountants is electrifying and deeply moving with themes of cross-cultural understanding
The messages in The Accountants come through loud and clear. The call for cultural openness and human-level connections, and the questioning of our overreliance on data, are front and centre during this 90-minute performance.
Yet this dazzling multimedia dance theatre, directed by the British artist Keith Khan and featuring an unusual collaboration with Chinese and Indian dancers, deftly avoids becoming a corny, moralising spectacle.
A backstory of an interracial friendship is voiced by two characters who the audience does not see: Liam, a young man of mixed British and Chinese heritage travelling around the world to find himself, and Auntie Kash, an older British-Indian accountant who is a close friend of Liam and his family in Manchester.
In the first half, we hear their voice chats and read their text messages as they appear on two giant phone screens suspended on the sides of the stage. They josh and banter over whether Chinese or Indian culture is superior, discuss Liam’s strange feeling that he has a bunch of accountants in his head, and leave each other with random, philosophical questions.
This disembodied relationship ends with Liam finding out that Auntie Kash has died, which we hear through a call to his mother. Devastated, he abandons his search for identity and returns to Manchester.
