Rambert Dance Company review
Monday 14 April 2008
Rambert Dance Company: World View Tour 2008
Rambert’s current touring production presents a different selection of four, out of six potential dances, at each venue. Each piece has a different choreographer and score and so the evening is a fantastic opportunity to directly compare different styles of contemporary dance directly. As a result, my experience of the programme at Newcastle’s Theatre Royal was mixed.
The opening piece I loved. L’Eveil featured eight (I think) women in simple leotard-like costumes in the kind of choreography I love best. The women moved independently and beautifully around the stage, and then suddenly one would see that their postures had become co-ordinated. They would strike a series of identical poses, or together create a single tableau, and then move seamlessly from this into independent routines. Most interestingly, I felt, the piece was set to music sung live on stage by a female singer. Her lyrics gave me a touchstone from which to interpret the dance and I loved seeing a story told in the bodies of the dancers. Overall, the piece struck me as a feminist work, in its celebration of women. And, as always, I was staggered by the control the performers had over their bodies and the way in which they could manipulate them into not always elegant, but often clearly difficult postures.
Another piece presented on the same night, Swansong, demonstrated the same technical excellence and beauty I had enjoyed in L’Eveil. In particular, the tap routines were a real joy to behold. However this dance was marred for me by its trite and shallow handling of a serious topic – the torture and interrogation of a ‘prisoner of conscience’. Though the piece was premiered in 1987 this theme has obvious relevance now, and is often on the front pages of our newspapers. It was therefore particularly unsettling to see the interrogatory and torture techniques of a pair of guards represented by a soft-shoe shuffle and a duet with canes. Occasionally, the guards would leave the prisoner alone in his cell, whereupon he evocatively danced his desire for freedom. In particular, the choreography used repetition, presumably to symbolise the thoughts of the prisoner and the questioning of the guards. The synthesised score was also successful in conjuring up a feeling of walls and metal bars. Nevertheless, in the end the piece was simply not equal to its subject matter. Is it even possible for dance, such a beautiful and tender medium, to convey violence and cruelty?
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