“Sumptuousness and sensuality is everywhere. Though it features some 70 dancers, James Cousins’ We Are As Gods is not only, perhaps not even mainly, a dance performance. A “takeover” of Battersea Arts Centre that spreads across its rooms, corridors and staircases. One of the event’s aims is to let us experience the wonders of the building, from the mosaic floors and marble steps, through the cupolas and vaults that arch through its chambers, to the creaky back stairways, cubbyholes and fire escapes. An attic is arrayed with glistening gold boulders; one gallery is filled with statuary, busts and torsos adorned with tassels and brocades in a hybrid of classicism and surrealism.

Sumptuousness and sensuality is everywhere. We are guided by languid performers draped in gauzes, their eyes and lips daubed silver – part caryatid, part starship trooper. The more choreographed episodes often feature robing, disrobing and the exchanging of gorgeous garments – and Cousins is alert to their erotic nature, whether implicit in subtle glances and delicate finger movements or, in one more dangerous liaison for a couple in a satin bedroom, explicitly expressed in a dynamic powerplay between fabric and flesh. Are we present in the dancers’ imaginary world, or they in our real one? The question itself becomes one of the evening’s pleasures.”

“We are as Gods transforms the massive Victorian, former town hall into a fantastical clubland, a provocative art gallery, a gathering place where people can feast on movement, poetry, music and bodies. Cousin’s first large scale work is in good hands with trusted collaborators and Jasmine Swan’s inspired set and costume designs. As well as being dazzling and visionary, the work does two essential things: it breathes life into the venue again, starved of performance over lockdown and brings people – audiences and artists – together socially to consume art.

Dancers decorating the elegant marble staircase, dressed as angels and posing as unnervingly convincing sculptures, rouse themselves to become our nonchalant guides. We don’t have to follow but I find myself being swept along in their powerful aura through a labyrinth of halls, offices, a members’ room and intimate studios. The journey up and down stair, or along corridors, reveals the faded grandeur of the multifaceted building and disclosed secret, inner chambers that one wouldn’t know about. Entering these different rooms is exciting, like opening a box of very unusual chocolates and anticipating the taste. Each contains something different to watch or experience: an illuminated metal frame in the shape of a huge cube; kitsch gaudy sculptures and furniture; a fake grass floor with neon signs or hundreds of helium balloons. The performers we encounter in these spaces, somewhat alien in theatrical make-up, outlandish costumes and lit by ambient enriching luminosity, resemble extraordinary party people from Sci Fi movies, hybrids of human and replicant forms, whose dress sense embraces an eclectic fusion of fashion styles. We are as Gods will be remembered as a visual and sensuous spectacle but it also quietly invites us to build a better future by inhabiting space responsibly together.”

“The most ambitious show since lockdown.”