Rambert Dance Company at Brighton Theatre Royal
WORDS, not music, are the wellspring for three of the four works Rambert present on their 2010 British Tour. Perhaps make that four.
Curtain up on Wednesday, the first of four nights and two matinees, and the opening Dutiful Ducks is a short, succinct male solo to the metre and spontanaiety of simply words only.
The Comedy of Change, which comes third in the evening, is artistic director Mark Baldwin's concentrated response to Darwin's written theory of evolution, Origin Of The Species, the 150th anniversary of which Rambert thus mark this year. Fourth and finally, Tread Softly is Welsh-born choreographer Henri Oguike's highly pleasing response to exerpts from a WB Yeats' poem.
And arguably the fourth inspirational words are the verbals between herding men that are expressed silently by reinforcing action towards one another. These Cuban choreographer and Rambert dancer Miguel Altunaga explores in Don't Think About It, which is performed second.
Rambert-trained, Hastings' finest son Jonathan Goddard returned to Rambert last year via Richard Alston Dance Company, where he was contemporary dance's first Male Dancer of the Year in 2008. So fluent, so flexible, he now evidently takes an untrumpeted principal status and delivers Dutiful Ducks, a work by Alston, himself a former Rambert artistic director. On home choreographical territory, Goddard even took his applause with the RADC deep, hanging, loose-armed bow.
Don't Think About It is an all-male cast look at an individual's attempt to shed the masculine grouping stereotype, to varied contemporary music by Yann Tiersen, Badmarsh and Shri.
Sometimes downright unattractive male behaviour is then followed by the stuff the opposite to women in The Comedy of Change.
Baldwin and composer Julian Anderson's abstract score work through Darwin's principals of same/different, reveal/conceal and past/future in animal behaviour and species progression. A mixed septet, emerging from individual chrysalises in symbolically halved bodysuits of white front, black back that in conclusion become monotone white (male) and black (female) but with ghostly full head and face cover.
Goddard wraps a squatting colleague in metal foil, the shape created then deserted by the human mould to leave, perhaps, a Buddah on the floor. It's destined, of course, to a fate. And no black-skinned dancer is included.
But mixed races celebrate Schubert's Death and the Maiden String Quartet, played superbly by Rambert Orchestra's Richard George, Juliet Snell, Alistair Scahill and Deirdre Cooper, but without a curtain call. Oguike's three selected lines from Yeats' He Wishes For the Cloths Of Heaven are a poor man's plea to his love to Tread Softly over his dreams he has spread beneath her feet.
Unrelentingly rhythmic Schubert, sensual costumes by Asalia Khadj, five boys, five girls celebrate a marriage of musical masterpiece and fragile poem (what wonder would a Schubert's song-setting of this Yeats have produced?) in which the violins and human bodies indeed dance softly in the face of death.
If all this was not hint enough, the 50-page Rambert programme is a declaration of the substance and intellectual stimulus sent into our world by modern contemporary dance. Rambert shares in leading the globe in that, and they choose Brighton as one of their only seven provincial touring destinations.
And Goddard now has his own entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Dance. Contemporary dance is being heard as well as seen.
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Monday 28 May 2012
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