Unrest
Choreography
Richard Alston
Music
Arvo Pþrt
Fratres
Dancers
Samantha Smith
Martin Lindinger
Antonia Grove
Paul Liburd
Elizabeth Old
Glenn Wilkinson
Sounding
Choreography
Siobhan
Davies
Music
Giacinto Scelsi
Okanagon
Dancers
Rachel Poirier
Glenn Wilkinson
Elizabeth Old
Miranda Lind
Vincent Redmon
Rafael Bonachela
Pierrot
Lunaire
Choreography
Glen Tetley
Music
Arnold
Schoenberg
Pierrot
Lunaire
Song Cycle
Dancers
Martin Lindinger
Pierrot
Deirdre Chapman
Columbine
Branden Faulls
Brighella
Detritus
Choreography
Wayne McGregor
Music
Scanner
Dancers
Ana Lujn Sanchez
Rafael Bonachela
Paul Liburd
Antonia Grove
Samantha Smith
Angela Tower
Roberto Forleo
David Hughes
Deirdre Chapman
Lucilla Alves
Mikeala Polley
Glenn Wilkinson
Attila Kun
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Rambert Dance Company
Sadler's Wells
12 - 23 Jun 2001
Seventy-five years is a long time for a ballet company to survive. Rambert Dance Company celebrates the milestone this spring with a program proving what has kept them around for so long. Marie Rambert herself was a Polish dancer who trained with Dalcroze in Switzerland and came to London to help Vaslav Nijinsky make Le Sacre du Printemps; her Ballet Club started in 1926 with a piece by an unknown named Frederick Ashton. Since then, eclecticism and strong new choreography have always marked the group, especially after it remade itself from full-sized ballet company into a more streamlined modern dance troupe. The anniversary performance reunites old successes and offers new ones.
Richard Alston was resident choreographer and artistic director of the company before the current reorganization, and his Unrest a premiere, seems a quiet little gift to his former colleagues. In the score, Arvo Pärt's Fratres a violin accompanied by piano tests the highest parts of its register, then moves even higher, in long spare passages of placid desperation. Alston finds a movement equivalent in three couples who calmly seek and test different types of fraternity that they want but can't quite find. As the music arrives at a sort of rest, all six dancers come together in an interlocking line of diagonal steps, then each man and woman lean on one another in unison: Alston shows himself brave enough to rely on simply emotional imagery. In the final bars, a woman embraces her partner, then straightens to look around before bending into stillness again. This consolation stays wary. Unrest doesn't try to be more than it is, and what it is moves and satisfies
Siobhan Davies's Sounding – which Rambert Dance Company premiered more than ten years ago – is a more ambitious piece. The choreography use the austerity of Giacinto Scelsi score not as model but as counterpoint for its precise geometrical effects. Pairings here are unemotional: dancers come together to build human sculpture, they lean against one another solely to see how much contrary force a body's vector can bear. Davies has described the laboratory-like collaborations in which she and her dancers assemble a piece, and the results can seem overly cerebral, but Sounding makes intellectualized experimentation both motivation and theme. Excellent lighting design by Peter Mumford heightens every effect, and forceful dancing brings each pattern and carefully posed group sharply into focus. Elizabeth Old, who seemed almost complacent in Unrest, here stretches her long body into gorgeously taut extension
Glenn Tetley's Pierrot Lunaire is even older and more of a repertory staple than Sounding, and has worn just as well. Like the mix of speaking and singing in Schoenberg's song cycle, the choreography often hovers between energetic pantomime and ballet. Pierrot at first seems a silent-film clown, his moves complete with Chaplinesque physical stutters and his interactions with Columbine full of jokes as obvious as intertitles: the come-on, the kiss, the slap. But the ballet moves quickly from a send-up of cliché to a danced psychoanalysis. As Columbine, Deirdre Chapman doesn't give the beginning what over-the-top kitsch the (rather thin) choreography needs, but she is convincingly brassy in the second half when her vamping harlot gets some wonderfully voluptuous steps. Branden Faulls's Brighella tries too hard. In the title role, Martin Lindinger is best in the vulnerability of the closing moments, when Pierrot, stripped of his costume and hat, moves slowly across the stage in a series of arabesques. Lindinger's lean body seems to get even leaner as the innocent clown stretches into experience.
While Pierrot Lunaire keeps its rare quality of being unsettling and crowd-pleasing, RDC has found an even better closer in the evening's second premiere, Wayne McGregor's detritus. McGregor already has an impressive range of choreography credits, from television commercials to opera. Recently, he has been researching the use of technology in dance. "Technology" sets off alarm bells, as it often means a cheap way to make banal choreography seem up-to-date. But this couldn't be farther from McGregor's project. Set to an electronic score, detritus begins with Ana Lujan Sanchez alone on stage in red light. She starts a fast-paced, barely-balanced ballet sequence, on pointe and then off, sinuous, hyperextended and quick. Two men join, short female-male and male-male pas de deux form, quickly dissolve, just as quickly reform. Neoclassical energies yield for a time to a trance-like modern group dance performed barefoot, followed by an almost improvisational floor solo full of contractions. But by the final section genre divisions are impossible: a swift developpe en pointe calls the group to order and sets all thirteen dancers moving through frenetic combinations bursting with steps. McGregor has more ideas, almost, than he or his dancers can fit, and they are dance ideas:detritus is without plot and agenda, uninterested in debates about ballet versus modern vocabularies, or technological versus corporeal effects, except in how such relationships multiply the possibilities of movement. He shows us what a classicist rave would look like. And he makes it seem natural while revolutionary: At the finale, the dancers keep pushing the limits and extent of their steps, the stage pulses with light and energy only just contained in the formal patterns of the choreography, and the audience is riveted and galvanized.
McGregor ends his piece not with a showy climax, however, but with a lone female dancer in the half-light; it's as if the choreographer refuses to be complacent about the effects he can create. That's fine, I can't wait to see what he will do next. Other dance groups take note: find choreographers like this, let them make ballets like this. This is how a company not only lasts but gets stronger in its seventy-sixth year.
Siobhan Peiffer
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