Dance Umbrella 2003 brochure 'Silver Celebration' reviews recent Dance Umbrella reviews more Olivia Swift reviews

Within that diversity some pieces were better received than others. Sara Rudner and Christopher Janney's Heartbeat left audience members bemused. The piece dates back to 1983 and at that time perhaps Rudner looked and acted the part of a dancer more convincingly than she does now. 20 years later she fluttered around the stage in a tracksuit and trainers, like an embarrassing mother after a glass of wine too many. The sound we're told was the live time amplification of Rudner's heartbeat, which was picked up by a machine to which Rudner was wired. It's an interesting idea but in itself, was not enough to engage with the audience. Heartbeat's saving grace was the live vocals and saxophone, played by Stan Strickland. If I closed my eyes when Strickland played I could just about imagine myself listening to a busker under a railway arch on an urban winter's night. It was a far preferable reality to being part of Rudner and Janney's audience.

Interestingly, David Gordon and Valda Setterfield's duet from Private Lives of Dancers (2002) involved movement less technical than Rudner's but was met with applause and laughter. Gordon and Setterfield succeed were Rudner and Janney fail by not taking themselves too seriously. The piece began with the silver-generation couple clearing up household items while conversing with the rhythm of routine and familiarity found only in long-term companionship. Once the stage is cleared of props, the man and wife took each other's hand and traversed up and across the stage, breaking apart and coming together repeatedly. As they moved, their conversation was replaced with the recorded reminiscing of famous couples from the worlds of dance and theatre, including Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Ted Shaw and Ruth Denis. The piece's reference was to Noel Coward's play though I also think it worthy of being described as 'the When Harry Met Sally of contemporary dance'!

In contrast to the older Rudner, Gordon and Setterfield came Akram Khan, the youngest artist in Dance Umbrella, who opened the bill with the UK premiere of If Not Why Not, a film based on his company's group and solo work. Live accompaniment from cellist Philip Sheppard helped ensure that the performance was more than two-dimensional, though even without his alluringly sliding and percussive playing, If Not Why Not couldn't have failed to fill the auditorium. With it, Khan showed how dance on screen should be done. No advantage of film over live theatre was lost on Khan who packs in close ups and clever effects to create a piece of Eastern-influenced dance that wasn't far off The Matrix.

Confident choreography also underpinned Siobhan Davies' excerpt from Bird Song that will be made into a full-length work for 2004. A male solo in low-morning light, to the sound of bird song, gave way to a female solo set to a tapping, popping rhythm, both of which explored with refined and inventive movement the way in which sounds affect our experience of the world.

Wrapping up the evening with finale-like confidence and exuberance was Richard Alston Dance Company performing an excerpt from Roughcut, which dates back to 1990. A cast of nine (five males and four females) threw themselves into a high-impact razzmatazz in which group formations shrank and bloomed like kaleidoscopes to Steve Reich's 'New York Counterpoint for clarinet and tape'. Were you to freeze frame any moment of their performance you'd be left with a perfectly balanced and striking picture guaranteed. Such magic wasn't lost on the audience or it seems on Val Bourne, Dance Umbrella's Artistic Director, for whom Roughcut is a personal favourite. It's appropriate then that Alston originally dedicated the piece to her saying, “for 25 years Val has managed to create festival after festival covering an extraordinarily wide range of artists and always taking the needs and the feelings of the artist to heart. That is something unique and something to be thankful for”.