Michael Clark
Dance Company
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Oh My Goddess
Sadler's Wells
1 - 4 October 2003
It is impossible to fake dance. Nothing can happen without a high starting point of talent and training, and if a dancer lacks either, it shows. The next phase of dance-making is the art of choreography, and in particular the imagination, the sense of form, the instinctive understanding of motion, which is the choreographer's fundamental endowment. There can be many reasons why choreography fails, when it does; and in this instance Michael Clark fails through a mixture of pretension and missed opportunities, giving us one uninteresting, insipid, yawn-inspiring series of leaden postures after another, to music which could have been better used, and with dancers who were made to look awkward and ordinary by the ordinary and awkward things they were asked to do. The performance was like the ridiculously enormous red empty programme which, at £4, the audience were expected to find amusing: it was inflated in gesture, and vacuous in content.
The disappointment of the evening was not alleviated but worsened by the fact that every now and then Michael Clarke's wit flashed through, for the briefest moment; and also by the very occasional striking movement or shape. But these were like sweet waters to thirsty Tantalus. For ninety five per cent of the time this reviewer itched to be out of the auditorium, so poor was the event. Just one example will capture the whole: for one long episode entitled "Satie Studs" four - yes, four - pianists complete with their own grand pianos occupy the back of the stage, each in turn playing very slow, simple pieces, while in the foreground dancers in pairs or small groups inch about at snail's pace, for a very long time, in very dull poses. It made one ache to see liberation into proper movement, to see the energy and freedom which are the proper attributes of dance, instead of confinement into banality and boredom.
AC Grayling
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