Les Noces
Music by
Igor Stravinsky
Choreography by
Mauro Bigonzetti
Costumes
designed by
Kristopher Millar
and
Lois Swandale
Cantata
Music
performed by
Gruppo
Musicale Assurd
Choreography by
Mauro Bigonzetti
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Aterballeto
Sadler's Wells
3 - 7 May 2005
Aterballeto is a company of strikingly good dancers, who perform with a vigorous, high-bred compulsiveness that keeps one on the edge of one's seat, not least because the dancers throw themselves into action with such sublime disdain for physical danger. Aided by breath-taking dress designs by Kristopher Millar and Lois Swandale in 'Les Noces', the women of the company look like supermodels, perform like gymnasts, and endow the whole with balletic grace.
One can set aside the wish - the prejudice, no doubt - that choreographers would leave Stravinsky's 'Les Noces' aside when choosing music on which to build dance, for it is inevitable that the louring, coercive, oppressive, even foetid rhythms of that piece will infect the dance, forcing a choreographer to elicit what is bleak and rape-like out of the coupling which the music describes. So it is with the recently revived Ashton at Covent Garden, dressed in dull brown Soviet tractor-girl dismality. So it is here, where Mauro Bigonzetti, hypnotised by Stravinsky's ugly score, describes the relations between the sexes as hostile, conflictual, full of tension and male dominance in the face of sullen female resistance.
Well: no doubt that is how it is in too many places in the world, and art must tell the truth. There is no faulting the athleticism of the dancers and their physical commitment to leaping upon and falling off the central table which separates the sexes and provides an arena - a battleground - for their sporadic and unhappy encounters.
'Cantata' has the meaning of its music too, proving that Mauro Bigonzetti is a choreographer who creates closely to his chosen score because he sees what he hears; a positive point. The folk songs and raw, almost gypsy-like music invoked for 'Cantata' permits an ebullient, lively variety of episodes, climaxing in a rousing finale that had the audience stamping its feet. Sheer energy carried the piece, and when time came for plaudits it went as much if not more to the singers, playing their accordion and tambourines with an abandon that brought the hot breeze of southern Italy right up Rosebery Avenue.
The evening's effect on this reviewer was an educative one. It brought out very forcefully how the relation of dance to allied fields - to mime and gymnastics especially, either by colonisation or by venturings into them in search of resources - has led some choreographers to lose sight of the essence of dance, which is a repertoire of movement differentiated from non-dance movement by the presence of flow, transition, unfolding, mutual integrity of moments related to one another by the use of space. Mauro Bigonzetti's choreography lacks this essence - or perhaps is still seeking it. He asks his dancers to be spasmodic, abrupt, one-armed, jerky, too often stiff or frozen, to move only to arrive at a posture, like a flickering arrangement of tableaux. Which is fine, as part of a repertoire; not as the whole of it. He seems able to choreograph for a few dancers at a time only; the rest of the company stand or sit until it is their turn. He finds it easier to choreograph solos than duets or more. In short, he is (is still) limited in vocabulary, and the result is that both dances in this programme had no trajectory to them, and no real variety - they began, and kept on in the same key, then ended without having evolved or developed or added or subtracted anything from the first two minutes of going from one held pose to another, without much rhyme, and with precious little reason.
This fine company might be stretched by the physical demands of the arbitrary arrangements they were asked to iterate, but what one would really like is - to see them dance.
AC Grayling
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