Article by:
Judith Mackrell
Repertory companies are rare in contemporary dance, with the single-choreographer model all but universal. But in their current mixed bill, Rambert make a supremely confident case not only as a company that can draw its work from a variety of sources but as one that has a deep archive to raid.
Didy Veldman danced with Rambert before she became a choreographer, and this season she’s back with The 3 Dancers, a work inspired by Picasso’s 1925 painting. Anyone who knows that painting well can see art-historical references ranging through Veldman’s material. Yet the choreography stands alone, both as a stylish, sophisticated dance structure and as a powerfully compressed study in the power play of human relationships.
The six dancers are divided into two trios, one dressed in white, the other in black, and initially there’s a purely formal connection between the two. As the stretching, folding, twining choreography of one group is echoed and refracted by the second, and as flashes of brilliant white light bounce the focus restlessly across the stage, this first section reads like Veldman’s dance response to cubism.
Progressively, though, the work delves into a more human narrative. Couples break out of the trios – one pair stiff with hostile emotion; one tenderly clinging to each other, alight with a manic gaiety. In a nuanced reference to Picasso’s own commedia dell’arte imagery, the rivalry between two men is expressed as a duet between a manipulative puppeteer and a mournful marionette. With Elena Kats-Chernin’s score of bleak, sawing stings and fairground accordion adding it own atmospheric gloss, The 3 Dancers is a clever, absorbing response to Picasso’s painting, pitched between carnivalesque energy and a dark dance of death.
Different facets of a relationship are also evoked in Kim Brandstrup’s Transfigured Night, set to Schoenberg’s hauntingly lovely score. The music was inspired by a poem in which a woman admits to her new lover that she’s pregnant with another man’s child, and Brandstrup takes that traumatic disclosure as the starting point for three duets that imagine three possible outcomes. In the first, the woman is fraught with the terror of being abandoned by her lover – she pitches herself awkwardly at him, reaches out to him across a gulf of unfathomable space. In the second, she has a yearning vision of forgiveness, the choreography smoothed into a tender, transcendent playfulness; and in the third, she and her lover are drawn into an edgy dance of acceptance.
There are moments where the duets alone can’t rise to the scale of Schoenberg’s score, but what makes this one of Brandstrup’s finest works is his use of a large framing chorus to embody the shapes and currents of the lovers’ emotions. As 16 dancers mass into wheeling clumps, split into grieving lines and plait together in hopeful embraces, they fill not only the stage but the great romantic spaces of the music.
Christopher Bruce’s Rooster has been in Rambert’s rep since 1994, and at times I’ve wondered if this Rolling Stones tribute has had its day. But the dancers on Tuesday night made it new again, with Miguel Altunaga the cockiest Red Rooster ever and Dane Hurst dicing with danger in Paint It Black.
Every record collection needs at least one Stones album, and performances like this show how right Rambert are to hang on to theirs.
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