 |
Hans Van Manen, the Dutch choreographer of Rambert’s opening work, is also a photographer, and his aptly titled Visions Fugitives seemed like snapshots of tenderness between couples refined into the neo-classical elegance of his ballet-lite style. Prokofiev’s whimsical miniature compositions provided the “fleeting visions” that Van Manen animates with duets that, like a pair of skaters, glide and swivel across the moment and then disappear as though to continue their romantic interludes offstage. Diagonally striped unitards sculpted the shapeliest dancers into Hellenic perfection. At its best, Van Manen’s dictate that less is more takes him to a sublime realm where feeling follows form. Although at other times, like when dancers jog around in circles, his minimalism seems merely lightweight.
Trading in stronger passions was Christopher Bruce’s perennially popular Ghost Dances. Back in the early eighties this work launched the craze for Amerindian panpipe music because Bruce’s lilting, tripping, barefoot moves are the perfect embodiment of its haunting beauty. Its theme could seem a little naïve in our globally-savvy age: beshawled Chilean peasants beside a gaudy pink mountain frolic while the sun shines until the ghost dancers, in skull masks and weeds, who could be their ancestors, or more sinisterly their political oppressors, come to extinguish the brief, bright flame of their lives. Yet somehow the work touches a core of sentiment that hasn’t aged. Bruce’s wholesome folksy style grew blander to my mind in later years but in Ghost Dances it stands full-blooded and vital, reaching poetic heights that other choreographers have barely matched since.
After this, Rambert’s new work, 21, from Rafael Bonachela, resembled a den of iniquity. Bonachela is clearly a skilled and sensitive craftsman and some of his early trios for women writhed and quivered compulsively with the intensity of Benjamin Wallfisch’s score. But their emotional impact was hijacked for me by his enslavement to an excoriatingly harsh aesthetic that is not his own and design of the worst possible taste from the creative team for Kylie Minogue. Pushed to extremes, the thwacking thighs, dislocated shoulders, shins bruising noses seemed to serve no other end punishment. Or worse, to make the dancers look like a backing troupe to the giant celluloid sensation of Kylie that floated before them as though launching her own perfume. Any remaining shred of the dancers’ dignity was stripped by unisex costumes that would have made Jean Paul Gaultier blush. Underwear with suspender elastic hanging off may have looked chicly fetishistic on the women but positively frightful on the men. 21’s aim to show the artificiality of celebrity was short-circuited by the slickness of its design and instead its message was: Leave the image manufacturers out of contemporary dance.
|
