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From his first forages into choreography Pita has revealed himself not only as an inventive creator, melding dance and theatre into what he now styles “dansical”, but as an artist of darkest humour, fascinated, as was the writer Roald Dahl, with visions of death and its deepest motivations. Like Dahl, Pita subverts the fairy story, the morality tale, to his own blackest intentions shifting and manipulating perspectives of good and evil rather like dealing a pack of cards and it is not uncommon to find yourself laughing at scenes of moral repugnance, before realising that actually Pita is laughing back at you. The Stepfather, his latest piece (dealing with the incestuous family life of a group of mountain folk) opens with typical Pita fodder: a child being pushed down a ravine and a man hanging himself. Thereafter the scene is re-wound to reveal its impulse and explain its motives, although plot itself is almost nothing at all; it is what Pita does with it – dressing it in the high fashion of wit and brazen campery, undermining the substance with a series of quirky stylistic grotesques, tempering it with sharpest irony switching suddenly to simple pathos – that is fascinating here. Much tighter, more effectively architectured than I have seen from him before and though he still appears more comfortable creating on men – they are either the centre of narrative, or the centre of dance focus – his individual and imaginative language sets him as an innovative creative force in the dance world.
 

Rafael Bonachela's And who shall go to the ball?
© Hugo Glendinning

Bonachela’s new work is in entirely different territory, “unprompted”, as Merce Cunningham once said, “by references other than to its own life”. And Who Shall Go to the Ball? is a hallucinatory vision of a ballroom space (Bonachela calls it a “sinister, primal ball”), the stage dissolving into fragments – duets, trios, small ensembles – of dangerous motion, a whirligig ever-teetering on the brink of collapse. As in Ravel’s La Valse the dramatics are of the knife-edge – a dancer’s wheelchair tilts dangerously on one wheel, ready to throw him out; a crutch becomes an axis around which a dancer is spun, (and here I thought of Otto Silenus’ “spinning wheel” metaphor in Waugh’s Decline and Fall) then a crucifix upon which she is lifted; patterns of movement begin in unison, only for dancers to break away, victims to the primitive violence of Scott Walker’s commissioned score and the dazzling shattering of Guy Hoare’s lighting. Dance here is of danger and survival – the dancer in his wheelchair attacks another like a Wili at midnight - and in its symmetry of confusion I found Bonachela’s dance language to be enthralling, fascinating. Sometimes I find he packs too much movement into too little time – he is a self-confessed “movement-junkie” – but perhaps when he relaxes and gives himself some choreographic space, some light amidst the clutter, he will surely become one of the foremost dance choreographers of his generation.