Where the wild things are

The creators of The Banquet have staged a dinner party to illustrate man's beastly behaviour

Bettina Strickler and Luca Silvestrini - the award-winning founders of Protein Dance and creators of the acclaimed dance work, Publife - have pulled out all the stops again with The Banquet. Their latest piece peels the veneer from a supposedly civilised dinner party, tracing the metamorphosis of four ballgowned and tuxedo-clad guests from polite sophisticates into feasting beasts - and back again.

"It's like watching party animals switching into straightforward 'animalistic' behaviour in a posh country house," says Dick Bird, the set designer. As human social interaction deteriorates, the guests are thrown meat to eat like dogs, by a singing butler-cum-ringmaster (played by the pre-punk cult figure, Richard Strange).

This journey into the heart of darkness bears all the usual Protein Dance hallmarks of finding humour, idiosyncrasy and absurdity in everyday life. But while the choreography plays no small part in conjuring up a Lord of the Flies-like loss of humanity, it is the intricately designed set that makes the piece so unusual. In fact, says Bird, the set came before the choreography: "They have used every single square millimetre of set design, and [created the] dance around it, rather than me designing around them."

It is the first time the company has worked so closely with a set designer, and the collaboration has borne some strange fruit. Bird says of his work: "It's like looking into the bellows of a camera - a forced perspective, box-like room full of doors and trapdoors, tilted up towards the audience."

The only limits on Bird's imagination were that the set had to be collapsible, and small enough to fit in a van for the production's tour. It seems, however, that innovative design can be rolled up quite small. The stage, for example, is carpeted with Astroturf, representing the forces of nature that gradually encroach on the house. "The piece is very much about the balance between civilisation and nature. You can't quite tell which is taking over the other and which has the upper hand," says Bird.

On the "civilised" side, he continues, "the ceiling has this lovely, decaying Victorian lincrusted wallpaper made of linseed oil, which Bettina and Luca saw in my studio at home and had to have - quite Changing Rooms, really. The doors and frames are all rusted iron - it's very beautiful. But the set is in transformation during the whole piece, because the lighting, by Michael Mannion, is constantly changing."

Meanwhile, the choreography works up into ballroom dance and spins off into lifts, tumbles and turns; the dancers wear beautiful costumes - party dresses, with mad frills that mutate. "They have a wicked sense of humour," says Bird. "The human mating ritual is examined under the sort of microscope that we ordinarily apply to wildlife programmes."

The Banquet is at the Place, 17 Duke's Road, London WC1 (020-7387 0031; www.theplace.org.uk) Tue to 14 Jun, 8pm, £15-£5