Ballet Black at the Linbury

Ballet Black, Linbury Studio Theatre, March 5

Works by Robert Binet, Ludovic Ondiviela, Javier de Frutos, Christopher Marney

Full company in War Letters

I shouldn’t have read it before going to see Ballet Black on Tuesday. I dipped into a memoir of Isadora Duncan by Edward Gordon Craig. ‘She threw away ballet skirts and ballet thoughts. She discarded shoes and stockings too… She was speaking in her own language, not echoing any ballet master, and so she came to move as no one had ever seen anyone move before.’ As I walked to the Linbury Studio Theatre, this is what I had in mind: a new language of dance, free of conventions.

Perhaps because the classical ballet language has its roots in the courts of Europe 350 years ago, it can come across in unimaginative hands as an esoteric, affected language that conjugates incongruously with contemporary life. Robert Binet, whose EGAL began Ballet Black’s program, bends and collapses his forms like a sculptor, taking full advantage of the pliant qualities of his two dancers, Cira Robinson and Jacob Wye, but I quickly lose interest when I see a pirouette here and an assemblé there like cryptic signposts dropped into everyday parlance — or worse, as lazy abbreviations of classical dance. Binet has a great talent — he choreographed the hauntingly beautiful solo for Daniela Neugebauer, Lake Maligne, at Bob Lockyer’s birthday celebration at The Place last year — but he might well take heed of his own program note as a metaphor for his relationship to his craft: ‘Both people being strong, but for moments unsure of their relative strength, can tip the relationship easily towards conflict. However, once the strength of each individual is harnessed…the two people are able to combine physical and emotional resources to go further than they imagined possible: to soar.’

In Dopamine (you make my levels go silly), Ludovic Ondiviela happily chooses a subject (attraction, love, lust) that dance can do really well (and we can easily understand), wrapping it in Fabio D’andrea’s music that is dripping with so much sentimentality that by the time the dancing starts we are like sponges at high tide. On top of that you can sense immediately that the abundantly sensual Sayaka Ichikawa is happy and impulsive and drawn to her man, and that Jazmon Voss is equally drawn to her. We thrive on their emotional involvement and Ondiviela is good at making his dancers talk without words while keeping the conversation colloquial.

The One Played Twice is once too much for me. Javier de Frutos is in love with the genre but the acapella male-voice Hawaiian Barbershop quartet just doesn’t do it for me. Nevertheless the two couples set off along the beach together, but the weather gets really humid and enervating, a balmy day without a wave, and there’s nothing to do and they seem to be going round in circles like a hoola-hoop, until Kanika Carr’s solo resembles Sarah Kundi’s and they’re back where they started. I have seen the imaginative heights to which de Frutos can rise but The One Played Twice is as low-flying as the bass in the barbershop quartet.

Glen Miller and Dmitri Shostakovich are strange bedfellows, though they never really get into the same bed in Christopher Marney’s War Letters. One goes out dancing while the other comes back from a dangerous sortie, and so it goes on. When the Glen Miller plays, the choreographic language finds its inspiration in social dancing, but when the Shostakovich plays the choreography falls back to the default classical pastiche. There is one moment that defies the trend: Ishikawa crawling away under the coat. But the facile patterns and thin characterisations wrapped in a pseudo romanticism about war all reek of Matthew Bourne’s influence: you know what’s coming and in no time it’s delivered.

What we do see throughout the evening, and what the audience rewards with such evident relish and pride, is a company of eight dancers who are a pleasure to watch, and who can dance as if there’s no tomorrow. All that is missing on this program is a language they can embrace with all the passion at their disposal. I was waiting for that Isadora moment when someone would come on stage and dance their words. Maybe I’m just going deaf.

Bob Lockyer’s Bash

Usually one receives presents on one’s birthday, but legendary BBC dance producer, Bob Lockyer, decided to celebrate his 70th birthday by asking his dance friends to commission a work or select one of their own to present at an evening of dance at The Place. There was a private showing on April 12th, and an opportunity for the public to see the works the following evening. Bob stipulated that the proceeds from the two evenings would benefit one of two charities: the Royal Philharmonic Society Drummond Fund and The Place’s Pioneering Fund. Among the Lockyer luminaries who contributed to the program were Dame Monica Mason, Robert Cohan, Mark Baldwin, Richard Alston, Siobhan Davies and Wayne McGregor.

The public evening gets underway with Drone, danced by two students from the London Contemporary Dance School, Drew Hawkins and the choreographer, Andy Macleman, to music of The Haxan Cloak. The costumes have the elegance of Quaker simplicity, and the movement itself alternates quiet austerity with bursts of energy. The two dancers set up an intense but sympathetic dynamic between them in both spirit and touch. It is a work of surprising maturity.

It is not often that pointe shoes and classical ballet steps grace the stage at The Place, but Dame Monica Mason’s commission, Papillon, by Royal Ballet School dancer and choreographer, Sebastian Goffin, reminds us just how far the language of dance has developed since the 1830s. Using Dvorak’s Silent Woods, played on stage by Rebecca Herman and Andrew Saunders, Goffin creates a romantic picture of young love and abandoned scholarship in rustic Kensington Gardens with the delightful Mayara Magri and Skyler Martin, both dancers at the Royal Ballet School.

Mark Baldwin’s contribution is Prayer, for four girls from the Rambert Dance Company, each revealing their respective lyrical qualities in a series of solos and forming a remarkably harmonious ensemble. Hannah Rudd’s solo would make any heart melt and the fiddler, Stephen Upshaw, plays a solo within a solo during a section of Julian Anderson’s score, while the dancers look on.  His movements are unchoreographed and utterly true to form. A revelation.

Richard Alston is clearly an esteemed colleague of Bob Lockyer because he is responsible for two offerings of the evening. Jo Kondo’s music, Isthmus, sets the tone for the first little gem. And it is little, although the dancers – all from the Richard Alston Dance Company – make it seem so much bigger.

The Way it Works is This… could have been the beginning of Eddie Nixon’s opening discourse, but Orlando Gough uses it as a starting point to frame a series of isolated phrases in a soundscape for Charlie Morrissey’s consummate dance of the same name. Brilliant. Siobahn Davies commissioned this, and chose the projected images from the work of Étienne-Jules Maray representing some of the earliest attempts to record movement photographically (I’m reading from the notes). Morissey’s thoughtful work, like Gough’s soundscape, is a lot of fun and its roots go way back to the minimalist contemporary dance of New York’s Judson Dance Theatre, something Bob would appreciate.

Robert Cohan’s choice is significant for both Bobs. These two go back a long way, which may be why In Memory is chosen, but it also clearly holds memories for Cohan, and there is a passion in the work that is life size. Set to a gorgeous score by Hindemith, his Sonata for unaccompanied viola (played beautifully on stage by Alistair Scahill), this extract of the work sees four men from Alston’s company dancing together until a girl in red with Cleopatra eyes, Nancy Nerantzi, arrives, which is where the passion really begins.

Wayne McGregor offers one of the most beautiful commissions of the evening, Lake Maligne, by Royal Ballet choreographic apprentice, Robert Binet. It is inspired by the paintings of Lawren Harris, one of Canada’s iconic Group of Seven and known for his luminous paintings of the Great White North. Well, the luminosity comes through in the dancing of Daniela Neugebauer of Random Dance. Binet’s choreography is fluid and suits Neugebauer’s qualities beautifully. Her hands and arms turn and reach and then come to perfect rest, articulating shapes that stay in the imagination, while the sonorous voice of Bill Callahan is like dark clouds on a summer day. Neugebauer is totally convincing, her eyes know exactly where and how to focus. Everything is just right, and the audience senses it.

Richard Alston’s big, final present is Shuffle It Right, to the irrepressible music of Hoagy Carmichael. Performed by eight of Alston’s dancers, everyone enters into the swing of the music, on stage and in the audience. This is a great way to end a memorable evening.

This is the kind of performance that could and should be shown on the BBC. It would be a fitting tribute to the man who devised it, but since there has been an evident change in thinking about what public broadcasting can present since Bob Lockyer’s pioneering days, what is familiarly known as Bob’s Bash will have to wait in the wings for a reappraisal of the value of dance production on public television.