Bella Figura
Choreography
set and lighting
Jir’ Kylian
Speak for
Yourself
Choreography
Paul Lightfoot
Walking Mad
Choreography
set and
costume design
Johan Inger
Company
Dancers
Carolina Armenta
Urtzi Aranburu
Bregje van Balen
Lorraine Blouin
Amos Ben-Tal
Isabelle Chaffaud
Natasha Crook
Rafaelle Delaunay
Ivan Dubreuil
Patrick Delcroix
Jorma Elo
Nancy Euverink
Shirley Esseboom
Simone Geiger
Johan Inger
Joeri de Korte
Vaclav Kunes
Paul Lightfoot
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Nederlands Dans
Theater 1
Sadler's Wells
18 - 22 June 2002
From this excellent dance company and the choreographers who make art from its talent, only the best is ever expected; and it always comes. It certainly comes at Sadler's Wells in this exhilarating programme of three wonderful dances.
Kylian's Bella Figura has been in the NDT's repertoire for seven years, but is new to this reviewer, who can say that it ranks among the best things he has ever seen from Kylian's imagination. A delightful selection of mainly baroque music provides the scaffolding for the fluent sculpture of movement which is Kylian's trademark, annexed closely to the music's rhythm. It is full of wit, clever observation, a ceaseless and fertile unfolding of ideas, and throughout all great beauty in the line, gesture, and sentiment. The NDT is a company which enjoys uncovering the eroticism implicit in the particular kinds of movement and interaction of bodies which constitutes dance, and Kylian is a master at weaving everything from hints to overt statements into a unified tapestry which, like the Dame au Licorne hangings of the Maison Cluny, tell many possible tales in one.
Paul Lightfoot's use of smoke and rain in his enjoyable Speak for Yourself is clever, and a good example of how dance is extending itself into new expressive dimensions by means of what contemporary staging can offer. The vocabulary of movement displayed occasional striking novelties, and in asking the dancers to lift, jump and slide on a wet stage, Lightfoot was making them dance close to the edge of possibility. With their superb skill they accomplished it as if it were easy, which it cannot have been. A jaundiced eye might have seen the smoke and rain as gimmicks saving an otherwise ordinary routine of movement; a generous eye would have seen how the smoke, seemingly pouring from the top of a dancer's head, became part of the structure of movement, like an extra form of music; and the wettening stage allowed the dancers' feet to make patterns of lines and ripples as they moved which took their steps below the stage's surface. The gimmicks worked.
Johan Inger's funny, moving, highly original and imaginative Walking Mad is an outstanding piece. By clever and absolutely necessary play with clothing and a moving many-doored wall he explores the comedy and poignancy of madness. The dancers chase one another, and especially a girl whose playfulness turns to obsession and isolation, first in the imprisoning angles of a wall that has closed itself into two arms on either side of her, and then among dishevelled garments scattered on the floor. Dancers throw themselves against the wall, and over it, in a kind of athletic abandon; the driving rhythm of Ravel's Bolero impels them, and they dance like dervishes, pouring energy into every gesture. It is completely absorbing, and afterwards one had the sensation of having read something, or heard a story being told aloud, so vivid was the portrayal given.
AC Grayling
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