© John Ross 'Bella Figura' reviews 'Speak For Yourself' reviews 'Walking Mad' reviews recent NDT reviews more Bruce Marriott reviews

If you have never seen NDT you really ought to - the dancers' technique at all levels is just as exacting as anything you will see in a world-class ballet company at Principal/Senior Soloist levels for example. The opening piece, Bella Figura, by Jiri Kylian perhaps best displays their technique which is so sharp, precise and controlled. They can deliver a toe to milimetere accuracy after traversing 30ft and spinning a couple of dozen times. I was particularly transfixed when one of the dancers assumed a seated position in mid air, her partner holding her waist and spinning her around and around and yet the position was absolutely held as if she were steel - certainly not made of flesh and blood. Later feet did an odd angled bourree - it lasted a second or two but the sound was like a machine gun and the toes a blur. The dancers' strength also showed in slow sections of dance that I think all three pieces on the programme used. Slow motion movement is so difficult and yet they do it as if it were an everyday occurrence.

Kylian's Bella Figura
Photograph by John Ross

Bella Figura has a Baroque feel, fiery braziers, some incomprehensible Kylian notes ("A journey in time, light and space, addressing the ambiguity of aesthetics, performances and dreams...") and girls that go topless. Not much of it makes sense but the choreography displays the dancers well and included a mock fight or two.

Paul Lightfoot, an NDT dancer and choreographer, has been noted for his quirky, fun productions in the past and Speak For Yourself was at first no different with a dancer having smoke jetting from the top of his head for the first 10 minutes. The programme note quotes Tao Te Ching (yes the very same), talks of gentle rain, and appropriately after a while it does indeed rain. At first you think it might be sand but eventually the mist forms puddles through which the dancers slide and perform other movements mainly denied them normally. It's rather beautiful with water flicking about, but the movement is pretty much more Kylian and was not so differentiated from the first piece.

Paul Lightfoot's drizzly Speak for yourself
Photograph by John Ross

Walking Mad by Johan Inger is to Ravel's Bolero. "Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness" (Socrates) is the programme note and the dancers caper around a moving wooden fence that folds, splits, falls over and secretly opens. It's a mad house (or wall) and hard to make sense of, though there is amusement at joke head gear and what the wall might do... but the movement vocabulary remains resolutely like the first piece. With the thunderous end to Bolero you think it's run its course but instead there is an Arvo Part piano piece to continue on. If you like mad picket fences this extension might clearly be seventh heaven. On the other hand if you don't...

Overall the theme of the night seemed to be madness and to thank for bringing these excellent dancers over we have W&S Transition Management who were given the biggest plug I think I've ever heard by (an un-mad) Ian Albery. Perhaps the 'synergy' of which W&S speak in the programme's foreward could help NDT plot a broader choreographic range then was shown here on this ocasion? But see NDT for the dancers.