London, at Sadler’s Wells: Highlights? Pite’s natural world, Ouramdane’s mystical one - Vancouver Ballet Society
By Sanjoy Roy
Like voters, audiences can be simultaneously essential, dissenting, and unfathomable. Take the sold-out mixed program by Nederlands Dans Theater at Sadler’s Wells, featuring one old and two new pieces. Everything looked great and was danced brilliantly (a sound reason for the company’s enduring popularity). What about the works? Audiences, fans, and critics were split on Gods and Dogs (2008), Jiří Kylián’s hundredth work for NDT, and on Gabriela Carrizo’s recent La Ruta. For me, Gods and Dogs exemplified what I often find frustrating in NDT’s hallmark style. Faultlessly executed and immaculately designed (a back curtain of shimmering tassels, an amorphous video projection that resolves into the form of a running dog), its needlessly fussy sequences appeared encrusted with stylistic tics, while its intimations of a spiritual journey felt hollow.
Admirers of Gods and Dogs complained that La Ruta was all imagery and no story, just haphazard happenings on a road. True, it combined the dream-logic and extreme physical contortions characteristic of Belgium’s Peeping Tom company (which Carrizo co-directs) — but what uncanny images, what unearthly moves. A vagrant in a bus shelter, roadkill, a fly-by of migratory geese, all rendered in slippery, ribbon-limbed transience. If the work went nowhere in particular, that seemed apt: neither did the road to nowhere on which it was set.
Audiences and critics united in favour of Figures in Extinction [1.0], the first of a planned trilogy by Canadian Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney, director of British visual theatre company Complicité. As with Pite’s outstanding collaborations with theatre director Jonathon Young, Figures in Extinction melded textual and theatrical elements with Pite’s flair for finding exact, but not exactly mimetic choreographic correspondences to speech, as well as her genius for group composition. Its urgent theme was the extinction of the natural world, rendered through a series of short scenes, each portraying an endangered life form — not just animals, but also a river, a glacier. Each vignette transformed some aspect of its subject — the schooling of fish, the perch of a frog, the outlandish curve of ibex antlers, or the slow tractions of ice and rock — into a choreographic composition, turning the accumulated scenes into a catalogue of variety, wonder, and compassion. In theatre, the human subject is almost always the main one; refreshingly, not here.
Late last year, several long-established British companies had their national funding cut entirely, including Russell Maliphant Dance Company, which gave what therefore may have been their last show at Sadler’s Wells, where Maliphant is an associate artist. A pity, then, that Vortex showcased many of his precious gifts without itself being a show to treasure. Taking inspiration from the work of Jackson Pollock, it set five dancers and a moveable screen (think giant canvas) in beautiful motion around a stage variously streaked with light, sifted with golden powder, or swept by billowing cloth. Though hampered by a certain evenness of pace, the work’s style was effortlessly classy — Maliphant’s distinctive alloy of liquid motion with tensile strength — and indicative of his perennial interests: the imprint of the moving body on materials (light, space, gravity, mass, momentum), and of those materials on the body.
One duet in Vortex takes place on a perilously tilted screen; amplify the idea to fill the entire stage and you get Skid, by Belgian Damien Jalet, part of a double bill at Sadler’s Wells by the Swedish GöteborgsOperans Danskompani. One tall figure appeared on top of a slope, and slowly slid down. Others followed, singly, in pairs, in groups. The trick was what to control and what to let go: using friction shoes to climb against gravity, reaching to others for help like a mountaineering team. All, nonetheless, would end up sliding off and down an unseen pit — because gravity always wins. An interesting premise, but its lurking metaphors rarely broke the surface of its design.
The other Danskompani work was Saaba by Israeli Sharon Eyal, with regular collaborators Ori Lichtik (music) and Maria Grazia Chiuri (costume). In sheer leotards, to a clubby, lo-fi soundtrack, the very fine dancers shuffled through the piece in clusters, phalanxes, and formations, always on tiptoe, arms coiling, hips jutting, and fingers twitching, like outlandishly strutting flamingos. The means were precise, the effect hypnotic.
Like Skid, Rachid Ouramdane’s Corps extrêmes (created for Chaillot, the French national dance theatre) placed the human body in unstable conditions, but its reach went higher and deeper. A quiet film — rapturously, vertiginously shot — followed highliner Nathan Paulin walking a rope strung across a mountain gorge, his voiceover narrating the inner focus, intense presence, and radical letting-go that such a feat demands.
That sense of mystical suspension — in which the body becomes the existential nexus between inner and outer worlds, and the self becomes superfluous — pervaded the performance. Film gave way to stage as Paulin himself appeared on a wire stretched high above us. Swiss free-climber Nina Caprez, together with the acrobats of French circus company XY, descended the back wall of the stage — a cliff-like surface, studded with grips and juts — as dextrously as geckos. There followed feats of awe and wonder: three-tier human towers, bodies soaring skywards between catapult and catch, pendulum swings along vertical walls.
Carefully choreographed, bathed in the sounds of Jean-Baptiste Julien’s open-stringed guitar chords, the whole piece seemed to breathe deeply and evenly. People working with all kinds of bodily practice — dancers, acrobats, sportspeople, martial artists, shamans — will recognize the work’s transcendent aspiration: to reach a place where the physical meets the spiritual.
