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What a difference a few days’ perspective makes. The imagery that remains most vibrant in my short-term memory is entirely derived from the two more theatrical performances and I’ve now little recollection from the shot of pure dance that separated them.

Divya means ’celestial or divine’ but is interpreted in India as encompassing anything that is committed to the path of Enlightenment; Ash is what remained when Lord Shiva burnt all illusion with his third eye in the dance of destruction that regenerates the universe. It is also, of course, the first name of Ash Mukherjee, who is fast becoming one of the most watchable and charismatic performers in the contemporary dance scene. Ash first came to prominence as a lead performer in Nina Rajarani’s Place-Prize winning ’QUICK!’ back in 2006; he was nominated for a National Dance Award in 2008; was selected to perform a duet with Michael Jackson at the O2 shows for which Jackson was preparing, when he died, last year; and Ash went on to be the sole surviving individual act in BBC 3s ”Move Like Michael Jackson”, just before Christmas. Divya Ash Dance Theatre is Mukherjee’s current incarnation and, in Affluenza it represents a fusion of the culture of Indian Dance as a mortal expression of the Gods - Indian Gods being essentially highly evolved and glamorous deities with surprisingly human faults – with the contemporary culture of a man who embodied all these characteristics. The circle from Indian God to Michael Jackson seems somehow to be completed through Jackson’s 'Divinity in Motion' lyric from the song ‘Dangerous’. Be that as it may, Affluenza is a surprising mix of Michael Jackson’s personal hybrid street dance style with bharatanatyam and Balinese dance. Thus we have, in Mukherjee’s own words, ”street dancers and jazz drummers grooving and jamming to temple dance rhythms that date from 9000 BC and loving it!”.

Mukherjee’s fellow performers were Tom Roache as ’the teenager’ who performed an extraordinary body-popping and locking solo. This self-taught 18 year-old, with a mop of tousled blonde hair flopping over his face, is a treasure trove of a find for future dance performance; Daniel ”Didge” Ovel performed the coke addict ’banker’ solo of b-boy moves, with a strong technique honed at street dance battles in Leeds, London and Paris and refined with a contemporary elegance from his training at Northern Contemporary Dance School; and Ni Made Pujawati (known as Puja) is a temple dancer from Bali whose own centuries-old classical technique seems to utilise the same extreme isolation of body parts that characterises breaking, locking and popping with the movement dynamic travelling from chest and torso to fingers and culminating in an intense emphasis on her spectacular eyes and eyebrows. Presiding over all of this is Mukherjee himself as ’the doctor’: chanting and clapping the bharatanatyam rhythms being drummed live on stage by Oded Kafri (backed by recorded music) as the other solos unfold and then leaping into the action with a flowing, black dress-coat accentuating his delicate, elegant but strong movement cascade.

’Affluenza’ is some way from the finished article and the immense strength of the opening solos is not sufficiently developed through to the end with some parts of the group sequences appearing to be randomly unconnected to the words and images appearing on the backdrop. Nevertheless, Mukherjee and his collaborators have identified an unoccupied niche in an overcrowded dance marketplace and they are filling it with an incomparable cocktail of talents leading to the consequent promise of a burgeoning future brimful of intriguing creativity.

By contrast, Rambert Dancer, Patricia Okenwa, took to the stage solo for her ‘Night Flowers’, meeting the challenge of this exposure full on with meaty and powerful movement, appearing as an Amazonian warrior in a triumphant dance before conquering her foes. Okenwa is a dancer who seems to grow in stature and physicality on the stage, infusing her role with the dynamic presence of power and personality that hallmarks a great performer. Her 15-minute solo never lost momentum although it lacked any meaningful reference points and I could see no linkage between her movement and the work’s title. Consequently, interesting though it was to watch, it left no discernible after-life; no intriguing follow-up of thought. Once digested, it was gone forever.

The 102nd and final Resolution! piece of 2010 was quite the opposite; a fusion of narrative theatre and dance that posed many questions and stimulated much ongoing thought. Curved Space’s ’The Nature of Things’ examined the role of three extraordinary women scientists in the decades-long quest for insulin. Actresses played the three women, including the work’s author and choreographer, Esther Shanson as Rosalind Franklin. This has been an interesting year for exploring science through dance – we’ve already had Bintley’s ’ E=mc² for Birmingham Royal Ballet and Mark Baldwin’s celebration of Darwinism for Rambert in ’Comedy of Change’ – and this work completes an intriguing triptych. The scientific formulae in the relay of work by Franklin with her contemporaries Kathleen Lonsdale and Dorothy Hodgkin are represented by three other performers: two dancers, Omar Gordon and Laura Caldow, portraying the crystalline patterns of earlier scientific discoveries, while the outstanding aerialist, Ilona Jäntti, signified the more complex patterns of DNA. The juxtaposition of dance and text to explain both an historic and a scientific narrative was always fascinating and the imagery of the three women scientists reaching towards each other over time to achieve the breakthrough solution which provided the work’s dénouement was extremely powerful.

Taken as a whole, this was a very strong high on which to end the 2010 Resolution! series, combining theatre and many forms of dance in a single thought-provoking evening of considerable entertainment. It was, in my view, David, undoubtedly a “ A HIT”.