The Sunday Times - Dance 16 de MAY de 1999
The Sunday Times - Dance
London, UK
16/MAY/1999
By David Dougill
A BRAZILIAN REVOLUTION
How appropriate - a spectacular show with a giant wheel is the highlight of the Turning World festival.
Vibrantly mixing modern dance, gymnastics and circus thrills, the Companhia de Dan?a Deborah Colker from Brazil were on to a winning formula with their British debut in a spectacular production, Rota, at London’s Peacock Theatre last week as part of the current Turning World festival.
The live wire Colker, formerly a volleyball player with the Rio de Janeiro team, keeps her cheerful-looking company (founded 1993) at a peak of eclectic training and a high-frequency pitch of physical activity, to judge by this show, created two years ago and internationally touring. Colker explains that Rota are "lines, circles, maps - the occupation and exploration of space". Act I of the two-part piece has a backdrop and floor pattern that could possibly be an air controller’s flight chart; there is a good deal of flight in the choreography. The women start off wearing hooped party dresses and booties, men casual suits. Into the big ensembles - much jumping and tumbling - Colker weaves routines made from everyday movements or gestures: smoothing hair, slapping faces, scratching noses. At one point a procession of dancers leaves the stage, bent double, hands to mouths, as if on the way to be sick.
Some of the jokey bits seem overexaggerated, aimed perhaps, like the loud rock sections of the music, at a juvenile audience - but then why not? Mozart and Schubert also crop up in the musical melange.
Act ii switches tone, opening with Gravity, where the troupe of 13 are dressed minimally in sexy chic white costumes designed by Yame Reis and supplied by Adidas; the stage is lit in a blue haze, and the slow-motion choreography is inspired by the weightless space walking of astronauts, translated into long-held head and neck stands and many other ingenious balances.
But the gorgeous climax is titled Wheel, and this, glimpsed in the publicity photographs, was what we were keenly anticipating. The production’s Coup de th??tre is a big wheel (22ft in diameter weighing one-and-a-half tons) that we might all love to play on, given the guts and, more to the point, the Colker dancers’ brilliant expertise and split-second timing. They twist round its rungs, skim its circumference, counterweight each other intricately to govern stops, starts and revolutions, leaping on, somersaulting off. And finally, eight of them dangle, bodies curled up, to suggest carriages on - since the accompaniment is a Johann Strauss waltz, let’s say - Vienna’s great wheel, though is was Disneyland that gave Colker the idea. The effect is lovely and exhilarating that she cuts it off rather abruptly when we are longing for more is a quirky tease.
Our own Siobhan Davies Dance Company can always be relied on for striking theatrical effects. Davies’ latest work, Wild Air, premiered at Oxford’s Playhouse and now touring, has a decor by David Buckland of sliding grey corrugated and mesh screens; a voluptuous play of lighting in white, ultraviolet and turquoise by Peter Mumford; and computer-generated revolving images projected on to the back darkness, of a stepladder, a garden chair, a geometric shape of conjoined pyramids, and a dancer or two, one of them upside down.
Within this intriguing space, Davies sets her eight handsome dancers off into a progress of movement that bewitches with its glowing fluency, as much as it puzzles, but the sudden interruption of the interval occurs just as one of her cast, Henry Montes, newly arrived on the scene, has started a meaningful-looking solo, and Kevin Volan’s pulsy score for guitars and cellos is in midphrase, evoking South African landscapes. Montes looks almost surprised as we feel.
That must also be a deliberate tease from Davies, who doesn’t usually make two-part pieces - this is her first full-length one. To make us into the second half, Paul Old, self-absorbed in loose white pyjamas, is a focal figure (he is also one of the cyber images). Flowing through groups, duets, trios, Davies’ choreography takes pauses for mysterious moments - the women kneeling, skimming the floor with their elbows or one man sitting apart as if guarding the door of a temple - before the work ends in a sort of question mark.
The Rambert Dance Company return to Sadler’s Wells for their latest London season on Tuesday, opening with a programme that includes a new acquisition, The Golden Section, by New York’s Twyla Tharp. They danced for the first time on tour at Northampton’s Derngate Theatre as the closer to a triple bill that showed off the Rambert company’s versatility handsomely in a Siobhan Davies piece, Embarque, and Christopher Bruce’s most recent work, the poignant Four Scenes.
It counts for much in popular appeal to add big-name Tharp to your repertoire, but the Golden Section lasts only 15 minutes - it’s the final part of a 1981 creation called The Catherine Wheel, set to music and songs by David Byrne, of Talking Heads, though the selection we get sounds like a heavier version of Roy Orbison. Thirteen dancers burst on stage in sporty gold outfits, skitter, shimmy, twiddle their hips and jig. Matthew Hart punches and spins; chief heart-throb Christopher Powney in briefs and socks kickboxes, sexy-shakes and dives off horizontally into the other men’s arms. The women have their share of the action and hard work; but Tharp has favoured the men here for glamour, and the name of all their games is pizzazz.
At The Place Theatre, the Compagnie Philippe Saire from Lausanne (a regular Turning World visitor) appeared in a piece called Faust. It didn’t claim to tell the story, and I was far from sure what it did mean to do; but there was a certain elegance of style to the taut dance encounters - in a decor of glowing screens - that indicates none of the participants would ever connect. I lost patience with this convoluted piece a while before the cast bowed out with twigs in their hair, brandishing rattles.
