Crystal Pite & Jonathon Young/Kidd Pivot in Assembly Hall

Crystal Pite & Jonathon Young/Kidd Pivot, Assembly Hall, Sadler’s Wells, March 23, 2024

The role of critics used to be, for better or worse, to pen a considered appreciation of a show that might guide the public as to its value. Some critics took that responsibility to heart, others to their head, with the result that some had the power to decide whether a show was worth seeing or not, which, according to the renown of the critic, would affect ticket sales. That critical role has effectively been taken over by the publicity department of the theatre, especially with dance performances limited to short runs, replacing the art of criticism with the act of selling. The pre-publicity machine gives the public an appreciation of what it will be seeing by extrapolating past successes into the present and underwrites the public’s future enjoyment with any number of five-star reviews. This has eviscerated the national press of a critical dance voice.

At the theatre there is the glossy programme with more positive endorsement for the show. Then at the end of the performance come the inevitable ovations. It all adds up to a spectacular evening that closes the virtuous circle of the theatre’s pre-publicity. Either you agree with the publicity, or you are disappointed because you evidently didn’t ‘get it’. This is endemic of the commercialisation of culture, or perhaps more precisely of cultural commerce.

A case in point is Assembly Hall, a new collaboration between Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young with Pite’s company, Kidd Pivot, presented at and co-produced by Sadler’s Wells, where Pite is an Associate Artist. Recommended by the ‘success’ of their previous collaborations, Assembly Hall was sold out. Pite, a brilliant choreographer (my value judgement) in her own right, has been associated with theatre maker Young in previous productions (Betroffenheit, The Statement, Revisor). I only know Young’s work through these collaborations but have seen Pite’s work independently of Young. Their chemistry has produced a Pite variant that thrives on the intersection of speech and movement. Young’s side of the equation is the writing and adapting of text, but as a theatre-maker — he is the founder of Electric Company Theatre in Vancouver — he is also keen to explore the movement-to-speech and speech-to-movement relationship. There is thus a natural meeting of creative focus in their work that starts at a high level of affinity and excitement but seems to dissolve at the point where the writing takes a detour into the hinterland of the surreal before some sort of recapitulation and resolution. If the level of affinity and excitement lasts for the initial 30 minutes of the work’s exposition, in which the level of dance and recorded speech artistry is highly charged, we are left for the next hour to experience Jay Gower Taylor’s sets, Tom Visser’s lighting, Nancy Bryant’s costumes and Owen Belton’s musical sleight of hand. All are brilliantly inventive, but instead of enhancing what happens on stage, they are what happens on stage, which reduces their contribution at this point in the production to theatrical effect. Given that the subject of Assembly Hall is the AGM of a financially precarious benevolent and protective order of mediaeval re-enacters with props and costumes to hand, the scope of visual imagination runs wild. And while this is going on, Pite contrives with uncanny regularity a series of substantial solos for each of the dancers that have little to do with their initial characters or roles, and everything to do with their phenomenal ability as dancers. That Revisor followed a similar path indicates a certain structural fatigue in the Pite/Young alloy. Where it worked admirably was in their very first collaboration, the harrowing Betroffenheit in 2015, and in the tightly woven treatment of The Statement, for Nederlands Dans Theater the following year.

Where Pite excels is in her choreographic sensibility, her ability to match physical, emotional and spiritual sensation with music to create a single experience that arises from that transformation. In matching movement to the speech in Assembly Hall, it is the procedural nature of the words that seems to reduce the emotional and spiritual realms into which she can extend her choreographic sensibility. If it is a constraint for the choreographer it is not for the theatre maker, whose craft consists in the manipulation of words to dialectic or poetic effect. Pite and Young have proved their collaboration can work, but both Revisor and Assembly Hall leave one with the suspicion it needs to be reeled in or, like the AGM of the benevolent and protective order of mediaeval re-enactors, risk foundering on a point of order.

NDT1 at Sadler’s Wells

Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT1) at Sadler’s Wells, April 20

Gabriela Carrizo / Jiří Kylián / Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney

Nederlands Dans Theater has a rich association with choreographer Jiří Kylián, whose 100^th work* for the company, Gods and Dogs, is a welcome addition to the Sadler’s Wells program. Created in 2008 for NDT2, the choreography, with lighting by Kees Tjebbes, décor by Kylián, costumes by Joke Visser and brought to life by NDT’s superb dancers, shines like a polished hallmark of the company brand. For all the time Kylián has choreographed work for NDT, his prolific output has come to define that elusive (for some) crossover between classical technique and contemporary aesthetics. He matured as a dancer and choreographer in Stuttgart under the guidance of his mentor, John Cranko, who, as artistic director and choreographer, turned the Stuttgart Ballet from a provincial institution into an internationally renowned company. Kylián was thus a progeny of a fertile artistic turbulence that encouraged his own creative talents while he learned the craft of dancing (William Forsythe was another who benefitted from Cranko’s vision). For the 25 years Kylián was artistic director of Nederlands Dans Theater (1975-1999) he created the company not in his own image but, like Cranko at Stuttgart, in the image of his choreography. Whether it’s the hundredth or the ninety-fourth work he created for the company, Gods and Dogs is as fresh and confident in its use of language as ever. Kylián has the ability to imbue his choreography with a sense of thought that is endlessly intriguing, like a communication from an unknown land. Perhaps this is why Kylián considers Gods and Dogs an unfinished work, a glimpse of a world far away yet tantalisingly close.

What makes for an intriguing introduction to the evening is Gabriela Carrizo’s La Ruta (The Road), a crossover genre of mime, theatre and dance (Carrizo is the co-founder of Peeping Tom) that has the visual appeal of an Edward Hopper painting come to hallucinatory life. There is a connection between Gods and Dogs and La Ruta in the rubber-legged virtuosity of the choreography — and the rubber-legged virtuosity of the dancers — but where Kylián incorporates it as an extension of his fluid style, Carrizo makes it into a theatrical image of spectacular unease and humour (sitting in on an audition for La Ruta would have been a long gasp of amazement). La Ruta is the stuff of dreams and nightmares, of murky associations and the inexplicable sequence of events. It is beautifully designed by Amber Vandenhoeck, lit by Tom Visser with a score of original music and musical fragments by Raphaëlle Latini.  

In another, perhaps subliminal link to Kylián, the choreographer’s own words — part of an apologia for creating his website — could have introduced Crystal Pite’s collaboration with Simon McBurney: ‘…And yes, I am also painfully aware of the fact that whatever we do or make is doomed to disappearance, and that our “Planet Earth” will be burnt to ashes and then frozen to death and finally it will become a totally insignificant dwarf within the universe…’ Yet Kylián’s pessimistic expression contrasts to the rather saccharine ‘journey into climate emergency’ that characterises Figures in Extinction [1.0]. McBurney provides as a structure a recorded list of extinct species and geological phenomena — with text excerpts from John Berger’s Why Look at Animals? read by himself with interpolations from his six-year-old daughter Marnie — which Pite illustrates with some beautifully crafted animal cameos costumed by Nancy Bryant with Jochen Lange’s puppets under Toby Sedgwick’s direction. But lists are more the domain of lecture demonstrations, not of choreography. Left to her own devices (with her close artistic associate Jay Gower Taylor, playwright Jonathon Young and lighting designer Tom Visser), Pite has created memorable choreography based on a play (Revisor), spoken text (The Statement) and a scenario of personal trauma (Betroffenheit); she has also transformed the atmosphere in the Royal Opera House with a full evening work (Light of Passage) on the subject of existence. But with Figures in Extinction [1.0] she seems constrained by McBurney’s didactic structure. There is a spark of her feisty spirit in the creation of the climate change denier (a verbatim dance to words recorded by Max Cassella), a delicious and caustic cameo that flails against the evidence of destruction. Pite is a choreographer who, like Kylián, delves deep into the human psyche to create her works; in Figures in Extinction [1.0] McBurney seems to have appropriated that power but, in so doing, diminished its value.

* On his own website, Kylián lists Gods and Dogs as his 94^th work.

NDT2’s Triple Bill at Sadler’s Wells

NDT2, Triple Bill, Sadler’s Wells, February 16, 2022

There is an art to presenting triple bills that can all too easily be taken for granted; anyone can put on three ballets in a program but if the triple character of the works doesn’t create a spectator experience of the whole, then the image of the company is affected. I was a little apprehensive about attending NDT2’s recent triple bill at Sadler’s Wells (in collaboration with Dance Consortium) in view of the legacy of the Sol León and Paul Lightfoot years; their existential, highly produced choreography seemed to turn inwards on itself, while younger choreographers from the same stable were influenced to the point of in-house plagiarism. However, Nederlands Dans Theater is under new management. Emily Molnar has been artistic director since August 2020, taking up her position in the middle of the lockdown era. A tough time to begin, but politicians in the Netherlands had a different understanding of the value of the arts than politicians in this country: dancers were considered essential workers, so Molnar was able to continue working with her dancers in the studio. Since performances and touring were cancelled, it became a time for exploration and experimentation at home, allowing for a singular unity and maturity to develop within the company. “This is not the season we planned for but it will be the season that defines us in new and unique ways,” says Molnar in an interview with Annette Embrechts. Seeing the current program of NDT2 is reminiscent of the triple bills in the mid-1970s — a heady spirit of freedom and creativity in miniature form that defines the artistic integrity of the company. 

In the first work, NDT’s resident choreographer Marco Goecke’s The Big Crying, the maturity of the youthful dancers meets the maturity of the choreographer. In reflecting on the death of his father, Goecke’s tightly wrought choreography is suffused with imagery of pain and suffering that, through the bodies of the dancers, is transformed into visual richness. In the intricacy of movement and facial grimaces images of Duchenne de Boulogne’snineteenth century physiological experiments on the expression of emotions vie with the sensation of violence that Francis Bacon poured into his framed settings. In contrast to Goecke’s powerful physical imagery the voice of Tori Amos — particularly in the R.E.M. song, Losing My Religion — pulls the words apart to reveal their fragility. It’s a beautiful partnering of motion and emotion in which the balance between the two is in constant tension. 

Hans Van Manen’s Simple Things begins and ends, as its title suggests, in the interplay between dance and music; one can sense Van Manen’s enjoyment in working with the four dancing bodies in 2001 to sculpt the space around them in relation to the upbeat rhythms of Alan Bern’s Scarlatti Fever and the Allegretto from Joseph Haydn’s piano trio No. 28 in E-Major. Although there are only four dancers, Van Manen fills the space of the stage with his flowing invention and wit. The quality and precision of the dancers — Barry Gans, Demi Bawon, Ivo Mateus and Sophie Whittome — embody the youthful elan and exuberance of the choreography that, for all its brevity, continues to resonate long after the curtain falls. 

Johan Inger’s IMPASSE begins with his own visually arresting set of a wooden shack lit by Tom Visser with a video outline by Annie Tådne that suggests a childlike dream in which Sophie Whittome is the child who dreams. She has the qualities of innocence, impulsiveness and questioning but with the arrival of an ebullient, extravagantly costumed crowd she adjusts to what Inger describes as ‘a seduction of unending streams of ‘newness’’. Unlike the previous works, the opening scene sets up a narrative intent that is then swallowed up in the visual settings, the costumes (by Bregje van Balen) and the riotous dancing to the groove of Ibrahim Maalouf’s jazz rhythms. It’s as if Inger has found valid questions to address without the dramaturgical means to embody them: ‘How do we bridge the gap that grows as we stagnate…Can we nurture the ability to seriously interrogate the world together, and find the capacity to reimagine it?’ Even if this quote from the program note is a post-rationalization of the work, it’s a question the choreography and the dramaturgical structure of IMPASSE struggle to engage with.

What is unquestionable, however, is that the quality of performance in all three works and the production values that are integral to them reveal the youthful ebullience and imagination of NDT2 and the enduring value of a well-designed triple bill. 

Crystal Pite, Jonathon Young, Kidd Pivot in Revisor at Sadler’s Wells

Crystal Pite and Jonathan Young with Kidd Pivot in Revisor at Sadler’s Wells, March 5

Choreographer Crystal Pite and playwright Jonathan Young have collaborated previously on two productions, Betroffenheit for Pite’s company, Kidd Pivot, and The Statement for Nederlands Dance Theatre. Although each work is quite independent of the other in terms of emotional heft, they both use the technique of lip-synching to recorded voices as a choreographic tool. In The Statement, the relationship between language and choreography is the basis of the entire work, taking Young’s one-act play about corporate disinformation to expressive heights, while Betroffenheit combines choreography and text in a haunting expression of trauma. Their latest collaboration for Kidd Pivot, Revisor, presented recently at Sadler’s Wells, pushes the boundaries of text and its physical embodiment further than both The Statement and Betroffenheit, with mixed results. 

What Young has proposed is his adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector (Revizor in Russian), a farce written in 1836 on the theme of government corruption in a small provincial town. Young’s production uses the recorded voices of nine actors directed by Meg Roe with original music and sound design by Owen Belton and Alessandro Juliani. By making a pun on the Russian title, Young changes the function of the Revizor to a Revisor of government documents; it has no bearing on the outcome of the farce but the word play informs the adaptation. After the curtain rises to an ominous rumbling of thunder, we hear the voice of a narrator (Roe) revising her description of the scene a couple of times before she’s happy with it. We’re in the office of the Director of the Complex (Doug Letheren) who has called in his cronies to discuss the arrival of a revisor (Tiffany Tregarthen) who they mistakenly believe has been sent by head office to report on their incompetent practices. The clarity of Jay Gower Taylor’s minimal period set, Nancy Bryant’s lush costumes and Tom Visser’s lighting engage with that of Pite’s gestural response to the voices. The ensuing scene of heated discussion sets in motion a thrill of choreography-as-farce as we take in Pite’s transmutation of language into gesture and the imagery she extracts from every nuance of the script. The dancers embody their characters through total corporal articulation and lip synchronisation to a degree of verisimilitude where we see the voices and hear the gestures. Jermaine Spivey’s physical translation of Juliani’s speech-impaired Postmaster Wieland’s dialogue keeps the audience in gales of laughter and on the edge of their seats in anticipation of its continuation, while Ella Rothschild as Minister Desouza fleetingly combines imagery of the Russian orthodox church and classical ballet in a passing phrase about religion and culture. 

The sheer energy of creative investment in this opening scene, so intricately woven and detailed, is remarkable. In the subsequent dialogue with the revisor and his assistant (David Raymond), however, and in the further convolutions of the plot, Pite’s transmutation of language plays second fiddle to Young’s adaptation of the script, which now takes us on a digression through a conceptual landscape — what Young calls a deconstruction of a farce. The dancers are in rehearsal clothes, and the dialogue is replaced by the narrator’s ‘report’ on the action using stage directions, looped vocal phrases and fragments of recorded text. It is difficult to tell if this ‘report’ demands something less precise of Pite’s choreography, or if her choreographic ingenuity loses traction in the treatment of dialogue. What were the dancers’ individual textual-corporal characterisations gradually evolve into danced solos and duets — even sections of unison choreography — that change Pite’s focus away from the text into movement. Just when Young’s deconstruction seems in danger of completely losing the plot, the opening scene and its characters return for the play’s resolution. Once again the dancers are in their costumes and their dialogue becomes lip-synched action. But by now the effect has waned and a sense of déjà vu sets in. What Pite and Young had begun with such promise just an hour before appears to be already overused, or perhaps that long, conceptual, self-reflexive middle section has numbed our choreographic interest and drained the dramatic action of its momentum. In an intense collaboration like this, if one partner pulls too much in one direction the other’s contribution suffers. Betroffenheit and The Statement held the balance like a high-wire act between theatre and choreography, each on their own terms; Revisor is ultimately disappointing because that balance is not maintained throughout the work, and there is nothing the extraordinary cast can do to save it. 

Reckonings: works by Cunningham, Seva and Seutin at Sadler’s Wells

Reckonings: Julie Cunningham, Botis Seva & Alesandra Seutin at Sadler’s Wells, October 13

The cast in Botis Seva’s BLKDOG (photo: Johan Persson)

Marking its refurbishment 20 years ago as a production house catering uniquely to dance, Sadler’s Wells has commissioned 20 new works, three of which form Reckonings, a celebration of the future featuring UK-based choreographers Julie Cunningham, Botis Seva and Alesandra Seutin. Sadler’s Wells has lavished its production capacity on each and the result is a richly textured triple bill unified by Tom Visser’s lighting that demarcates regions of the stage into which the dancers can withdraw from sight and from which they can emerge; there are no theatrical exits and entrances. This corresponds particularly with the fluid spatial staging of Cunningham’s m/y and with Nell Catchpole’s engulfing interior soundscape. The work is a translation into choreographic form of Monique Wittig’s attempt in her novel, The Lesbian Body, to ‘create a new language that can function outside the dominant structures of patriarchal power’. It is not the cast of six women — Cunningham, Eleanor Perry, Hannah Burfield, Seira Winning, Sara Ruddock and Stephanie McMann — that suggests a lesbian discourse but the subtle structures that link them together, a fine weaving of almost abstract strands with sapphic overtones that creates a space in which no muscular, patriarchal figure would ever feel comfortable; the performers, dressed in Alexa Pollman’s body suits with diaphanous outer layers, seem to relish this independence. It is a pleasure to watch the way Cunningham opens up the space with such intellectual rigour; it starts in muffled containment as if the cast is an operatic chorus in a prison cell and develops into a sense of lightness and emancipation that Catchpole’s score reaffirms in its trajectory from dark clouds of industrial effluence to the open air, from interior rumblings to serene silence.

After the first intermission the contrasting, dark masculine energy of Seva’s BLKDOG is immediately palpable. In combination with Visser’s lighting, Ryan Dawson Laight’s wrapped anonymous costumes and Torben Lars Sylvest’s visceral score, Seva has invented a haunting, powerful reflection on depression inspired by Sally Brampton’s Shoot The Damn Dog. It was Winston Churchill who termed his depressive condition ‘The Black Dog’ from which Seva derives the title of his work and on top of Sylvest’s score are recorded voices from an imagined therapy session: ‘Let’s start with how you’re feeling.’ Set in a hip hop vocabulary on six dancers — Joshua Nash, Jordan Douglas, Ezra Owen, Victoria Shulungu, Shangomola Edunjobi and Naima Souhair — BLKDOG seethes with an inner malaise that explodes in tight, controlled gestures and broods in hooded acquiescence. Seva has developed an intricate and eloquent language within an urban context that manages simultaneously to get inside the head and flow through the body, seamlessly bridging emotional abstraction and a harrowing social narrative — an effect that is more Crystal Pite than Hofesh Schechter. In a work that depends for its affect on precision in both individual gesture and unison articulation it is a tribute to the dancers and to the rehearsal director Ekin Bernay that Seva’s conception is so fully embodied.

Like the two previous works, Seutin’s Boy Breaking Glass has a literary inspiration, this time through Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem of the same name. Breaking glass becomes in Seutin’s conception a metaphor for breaking through what may seem transparent but proves impassable, otherwise known as inequality of opportunity. She writes that five other authors ‘were all invaluable in my research about inequality, the act of survival and self-love.’ The problem is that however clear Seutin may be in her intellectual research such clarity fails to coalesce on the stage. From the outset there is a contrast between the formal volumes of the set — a broad white platform at the back for her five-piece band with a white dance floor bordered in black for her seven dancers — and the informal, folk-inspired choreography ‘inspired by Senegalese and Southern African traditional and social dances’. Visser’s liminal lighting is again on display but he seems unsure how to unite these contrasts. The members of the band are visually dominant which gives an importance to their presence and their music over the narrative taking place on the stage below them, while Randolph Matthews as the central figure among the dancers — the victim of inequality — is a vocalist. Attention on the primary theme is thus dispersed among the performative elements and while they are independently rich in expression, Seutin and her dramaturg/co-director Maxwell Golden have not succeeded in synchronizing their full value.

Nederlands Dans Theater 1 at Sadler’s Wells

Nederlands Dans Theatre 1, León & Lightfoot, Pite and Goecke, Sadler’s Wells, June 26

Jon Bond, Roger Van der Poel, Aram Hasler and Rena Narumi in The Statement (photo: Foteini Christofilopoulu)

The first work on Nederlands Dans Theatre 1’s season at Sadler’s Wells plays uncomfortably between entertainment and oppression. It’s as if house choreographers Sol León and Paul Lightfoot have abruptly interrupted the five dancers — Myrthe van Opstal, Chloé Albaret, Marne van Opstal, Roger Van der Poel and Jorge Nazal — in Shoot The Moon and leave us to observe the intensity of their unstable relationships on a revolving set of three rooms from which the only exit is through a door or window into the next one. The program note suggests each room contains its own love story, but the febrile gestural vocabulary, clinical partnering and the open mouths of despair suggest each individual is going through hell and has no psychological space for anyone else, while the pervasive trope of effortless high extensions suggest a compulsive narcissism. It is as if Ibsen’s dramas of domestic claustrophobia have met Virginia Woolf’s fragmented narratives without the nuanced psychology of the former and the acute formal tension of the latter. One might almost conclude that set, costumes and live, voyeuristic video of the dancers projected on the clerestory-level screen are all part of a hermetically sealed aesthetic of neurosis. León and Lightfoot choose Philip Glass’s Movement II from his Tirol Concerto for piano and orchestra to lend the work emotions that are absent from the choreography; it is not music on which the dancers rely for their musicality but rather a score to appease the audience.

If the elements of Shoot the Moon were limited to conjuring up the images it portrays it would make an interesting study in the power of the unconscious to affect a choreographic outcome, but seeing the company’s assistant choreographer Marco Goecke’s Woke up Blind suggests an NDT 1 house aesthetic. Again the subject is love, as expressed in two songs Jeff Buckley recorded, his own You and I and Van Morrison’s The Way Young Lovers Do. The first person we see from a cast of seven is Nozal who hasn’t yet recovered from the tension of Shoot the Moon, but Buckley’s voice is also in a register of despair. At least Goecke is trying to match the fevered pitch of his choreography to Buckley’s overwrought state of delivery, but given its gestural similarity to Shoot the Moon and its translation onto technically precise dancing bodies, the effect barely shifts NDT 1’s tormented aesthetic.

It only takes a pause to rectify this. In The Statement, Crystal Pite uses four dancers — Aram Hasler, Rena Narumi, Jon Bond and Roger Van der Poel — to recreate a boardroom scene in an international investment office that has just fomented an international conflict in order to profit financially. On an otherwise dark stage, Jay Gower Taylor places a long, shiny oval table that Tom Visser lights from a similarly dimensioned hood above it; the concentration of light on the figures assembled around the perimeter dressed neatly and expensively by Pite and Joke Visser is intense. Their preoccupation is how to make a statement that exonerates their superiors without taking the blame themselves. Using a recorded one-act play by Jonathon Young with the voices of Young, Meg Roe, Colleen Wheeler and Andrew Wheeler, Pite choreographs to the accents and inflections of its tightly woven and increasingly confrontational argument. In extending choreography into mime and mime into choreography, Pite puts the polished virtuosity of the dancers at the service of gesture; nothing is gratuitous. In its message and expressive power, The Statement can be seen as a contemporary successor to Kurt Joos’s The Green Table.

It’s hard to return to the house style of León and Lightfoot in the final work, Stop-Motion, where love is replaced by ‘a process of farewell and transformation’, the revolving rooms by an empty space and Philip Glass by a mournful Max Richter. The set by León and Lightfoot with its chalk dust is visually arresting under Tom Bevoort’s lighting and its effect is evocative of the ephemeral nature of life. The large-scale, close-up video work, directed by Rahi Rezvani, conceived by León and Lightfoot and featuring their daughter Saura, is reminiscent of choreographer Édouard Lock’s interest in and integration of film and performance for La La La Human Steps. However the visual gratification of Stop-Motion is no substitute for psychological insight and emotional strength and while the choreographic use of space has changed from Shoot the Moon, the vocabulary remains within a narrow band of imagination that fails to release the full potential of these dancers beyond their shapes and extensions.

Ballet British Columbia’s Triple Bill at Sadler’s Wells

Ballet British Columbia, Triple Bill, Sadler’s Wells, March 6

Scott Fowler and artists of Ballet British Columbia in Bill (photo: Chris Randle)

The UK tour of Ballet British Columbia that Dance Consortium has organized coincides with a change of government in Canada where the current liberal party under Justin Trudeau has filled up the cultural sector coffers the previous conservative party had spent years diminishing. Thus a medium-sized company from the West coast of Canada has been able to add to the country’s cultural profile in the UK and from the program Ballet BC offered at Sadler’s Wells it looks decidedly healthy. Artistic Director Emily Molnar’s opening choreography for this triple bill, 16+ a room, reminds us of the connection she has had with William Forsythe at Ballett Frankfurt although she has made the work very much in the image of her company. Only two of the current dancers remain from before Molnar became artistic director in 2009, so this is a group she has developed through exposing them to a rich gamut of commissioned works, choreographic methods and styles. It is a finely honed company that puts technical strength at the service of an engaging and generous choreographic language.

From the beginning of 16+ a room (2013) there is a sense of an intellectual approach to the physical language, as if the dancers are working out amongst themselves the problem Molnar has set them. At the same time the problem she has set — what would happen if you put 16 people in a room and started tipping it — creates its own dynamic of sliding, balancing, suspending and tilting that she wraps in a vocabulary of muscular classicism. Jordan Tuinman’s lighting provides a sense of both luminous intensity and architectural shift while Kate Burrows’ costumes give freedom to the contained force and articulate extension of the dancers. The energy that tips the room comes from the declamatory electronic score of Dirk Haubrich, providing a high-voltage current through its three sections to bind together the choreography, visual form and aural environment of 16+ a room into a single organic entity.

From Haubrich to Brahms is more of a musical step than it is to move from the style of Molnar to that of Crystal Pite. Each choreographer acknowledges a debt to Forsythe, and in Solo Echo (2012) Pite interpolates her vocabulary in the calm of Brahms’ chamber music (the Allegro non troppo from his Cello sonata in E minor and the Adagio affetusoso from his Cello sonata in F major). She quotes a poem by Mark Strand, Lines for Winter, in the program note, but Solo Echo is a poem in itself written on the bodies of the seven dancers and suggested in Jay Gower Taylor’s setting of falling snow. Between the exquisite opening solo of Brandon Alley and the ineffable sigh of his slumped body abandoned in the snow at the end is ‘a human journey from adolescence to adulthood’ that breathes with the emotional intricacy of the music. This is pre-Polaris Pite where the hive mentality has not yet coalesced; the sense of community is suggested rather through a constant tide of individual comings and goings, one motion inspiring another, not unlike the way the cello and piano weave their respective melodies yet maintain their respective voices. The unity of this intensely musical work is further enhanced by Pite and Joke Visser’s spare costumes of dark, pinstriped waistcoats and trousers while Tom Visser’s evocative lighting subtly indicates the shifting focus of our attention. If 16+ a room is extrovert and energetic, Solo Echo turns the dancers on themselves in a state of poignant reflection.

After the second intermission, Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar’s Bill (2010), originally created for Batsheva Dance Company with a score by Ori Lichtik, promises to further extend the scope of Ballet BC’s achievement. Unitards concentrate our attention on the structure of the body, its lines, shapes and gestures in four male solos that are respectively sensually outrageous, energetically comic, fluidly articulate, and stoically introspective. But the fifth, female solo begins to de-emphasise the individual to pave the way for the communal — a duality that pervades Israeli choreography. Expanding our focus to take in the entire stage at once, the nature of the visual game is searching the shifting unity of the 18 undulating, gesticulating dancers for subtle changes in rhythm and shape that Omer Sheizaf’s tonal lighting both emulates and encourages. Eyal and Behar extract sufficient differentiation within the group, but after the assertive individuality of the first two works Bill feels in its latter construction disconcertingly insubstantial. It is perhaps a case of the work’s formal integration into the company’s West coast ethos lacking the vital context of its social and cultural origins.

(Ian Abbott was the first to see this program at the Birmingham Hippodrome in 2016)