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George Piper DancesOctober 2001 London, The Roundhouse by Jane Simpson |
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Of all the strange and unexpected goings-on in the George Piper Dances programme, the strangest of all was what happened to William Forsythe's Steptext. In the unconventional surroundings of the Roundhouse, where you sit with absolutely no expectations of what sort of dance you will be seeing, all the aspects of the piece which can alienate and disturb an audience in an opera house setting suddenly become perfectly normal. The lights go on and off, the music starts and stops, dancers arbitrarily appear and disappear - and you think, why not? It might just as well be this way as any other. If you've seen it before, you notice the actual choreography rather more, and being so close to the dancers you're a lot more aware of the physical effort that's going on; but almost all the shock effect is gone. A good thing, or not? I'd guess audiences like it better seen like this, but Forsythe himself might think it had lost a lot of the point he was trying to make. Either way, it's a neat illustration of what Michael Nunn and William Trevitt are trying to do: to to get rid of some of the preconceptions about what dance 'ought' to be, and thereby to bring it to a wider audience. Opening at the Roundhouse was part of their defence against being too easily categorised. It was something of a gamble, but judging by the size and enthusiasm of the their audiences, it seems to be coming off - there were very few empty seats, even midweek. Steptext opened the programme and was very well received, but the real hit came at the other end of the evening with Russell Maliphant's Critical Mass, a triumph for the two stars (and for the choreographer). If they're not careful they'll be stuck with ending the show with this piece every night, for ever.
These two dances, repeated from GPD's opening performance in Harrogate, make the framework for a fine programme. What comes in between needs sorting out, though. Nunn and Trevitt see their future role as producers rather than choreographers, so presumably what they've provided for this programme are by the way of stopgaps. Their Moments of Plastic Jubilation is the Boyz playing with their Toyz - wall-to-wall technology, mildly entertaining to see once, but probably a lot more fun to make than to watch - and Trevitt's Tangoid, danced the night I was there by Lucy Dodd, Justine Doswell and Christopher Marney, is a sketchy series of sketches, not adding up to very much. Paul Lightfoot's Sigue gets a much better performance that it deserves from Trevitt and the admirable Oxana Panchenko. For the company's next London appearance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in December, a piece by Charles Linehan joins the repertory, I imagine to replace one of these three: if the directors can also harness their obvious passion for video into valid new work, GPD could become a welcome, and unique, addition to the dance scene.
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