A lot of night music
Bryan Robertson
When I returned to London in the winter of '75-'76 after four years in America, the liveliest and most spectacular innovation seemed to be the establishment of the London Contemporary Dance Theatre in a packed-out five-week season at Sadler's Wells. They offered a seemingly endless repertoire of new ballets, uneven in quality but often gripping in their exact equation of idea and feeling, movement, sound, colour and light, all of them charged with real theatrical energy. Living in New York meant that a lifelong passion for ballet and modern dance, or any kind of dancing from Ram Gopal and the Balinese or the Kabuki players via Katherine Dunham to Pilar Lopez, was stimulated to fairly tough standards by the incessant dance activity in that city. So that my enthusiasm for the LCD Theatre's season was not just an indulgent reaction to memories of earlier and often uncertain performances at the end of the 'sixties by the very new London School of Contemporary Dance at their HQ, The Place (still humming), off Euston Road. Two seasons later, I'm just as startled by the speed and brilliant assurance with which this School has flowered into a professional Dance Theatre, even more deeply impressed by the authority and sheer inventiveness of what they've created.
I'm bemused, also, by the audiences flocking again. to Sadler's Wells for a new season of the LCD Theatre which opened last week. It's a predominantly youthful crowd but hard to classify, unlike those that I remember for Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham or Paul Taylor (artier, better dressed, more upholstery)—and not quite like the public that I've seen for the Ballet Rambert (as above but less upholstery, more educational types), which of course was doing pioneer work for modern dance in London through the efforts of Norman Morrice, Glen Tetley, Christopher Bruce, Nadine Baylis and others long before the LCD Theatre was launched. This audience for LCDT is quite noisy, extrovert, unsmart but sophisticated, cheerful, lots of students from schools and polytechnics, and a bit professional—sometimes bunches of students half ironically cheering on their own teachers as dancers. (The public for Mart is just as youthful but with more elegantly or self-consciously demotic style, old radical chic, almost.)
[like this audience for LCD Theatre but of course it's only a reflection of the immense following now for modern dance all over England. Think of soccer crowds and you'll be near the mark: it's far larger than any public now for cinema, theatre or even music. As a phenomenon this deserves attention.
Apart from the intrinsic merits of dancing and choreography, my special enthusiasm for the LCDT comes from an obsession with visual qualities: if your whole experience is geared to the standards of Matisse or Memling it is hard to accept the classicism or the modernity of greeting-card design, which is what a lot of English ballet or dance looks like. Macmillan's Rituals (Sonnabend designs) looks fine at Covent Garden, but that's a rare level. The LCDT time and again delights my wary eye.
The company owes its existence to Robin Howard, an enthusiast for modern dance whose vision and tenacity founded the school and then developed the professional company of dancers and choreographers. In my view, Howard is one of the great reforming Englishmen of recent times in the creative and performing arts and his swift achievement, for such an exact and measured man, is disconcerting—he must also have worked financial miracles with official and unofficial support, though problems doubtless persist. My admiration for Howard goes equally to Robert Cohan, his Artistic Director and principal choreographer from the beginning. Cohan is an American dancer trained by Martha Graham, and in classical ballet (furtively on the side, as a Graham student). In explaining why Cohan's involvement has been so potent, we get down to the specific identity of the LCDT.
However brief Cohan's experience with classical ballet as a young dancer—for his creative intelligence is essentially for modern dance—it provided just the right stabiliser or leavening force to keep if not the new school then certainly the emergent professional company along flexible and open lines. Watching some of the wilder extremes of modern dance years ago, either Rainer and Morris or Merce Cunningham, it was clear that, as in sex, there are limits to the postures that our bodies can eloquently adopt. Through synthesising some of the lifts and movements of classical ballet with the freer and more direct responses of modern dance, Cohan has built up a clearly articulated choreography which avoids that strained impasse of non-communication thrown up by the more contorted kinds of modern dance. He has also kept at bay the whimsical behaviourism from 'happenings' that's sometimes confused modern dance. There's a cool, easy flow to Cohan's work which projects with ease the many real inventions that he provides for his dancers, and his best choreography avoids any weak compromise. But if balance is all, Cohan's most significant ballets, Nyrnpheas, No Man's Land, Class and Stabat Mater, for example, are striking ly individual. I'll describe some aspects of these and other works later.
Just as vital to the LCD Theatre's success, and an integral, unforced part of its character, is its humour and this again has come from America through Cohan's teaching and example, though more than matched bY the individual style of his younger American colleague and Associate Choreographer Robert North. Mr Cohan doesn't dance now, and has the quiet, unassuming and amused diffidence of manner which usuallY goes with steely purpose, but as a dancer, Robert North is one of the companY's biggest assets: strikingly handsome, with a powerful presence that can be ferocious and panther-like as in the bandit's role in Rashomon which Mr North choreographed with Lynn Seymour for the Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet—but also, when apPropriate, with a very likeable presence (a price: less theatrical advantage, rarer than you 'n think) and its own laconic wit. In short, Robert North is a fine dancer and choreographer and the best visual answer to anyone left who still thinks that ballet or modern dance is a bit soppy, but I want to explain what I mean by humour or wit in dance. It'S best expressed in North's ballet Troy Galilee which takes the energetic mickey out 0' machismo, team spirit and other sacred bulls without camping about. What I don't mean is the Massine-inspired fussiness of gesture and other kinds of archness that you used to find in a lot of English ballet.
At its broadest and simplest, I nle3,11 the casual elegance of Astaire or Kell); sauntering along a street. More preciselY, mean the jokey charm you find in some of Jerome Robbins's ballets, which came °rig' inally from Balanchine who,with acute shovibiz flair and slangy wit, devised choreo; graphy years ago for a few Broadway and Hollywood musicals. Merce Cunningharn has it, too, of course, and Robert Wilson (Cranko sometimes touched it) and its char' acter is American because it comes front jazz. If, as I've long believed, the narrative style, the flow and stress and feeling for Ian' guate, of American literature comes fr°111 the sonorities of the Bible (and the suPPlicat' ing, ascending line of the hymnal forrn) edgy alliance with the syncopation and int' provisations as well as the staccato disruP: tions of jazz, in equal measure, than !` %shouldn't be surprising to find that Arne can movement is conditioned by jazz. don't believe me, watch a fast bowler at. Lords and then think back to any merilorY,_°. a baseball pitcher in Sports Illustrated or Inc.
movies.
With imaginative effort, the Eng. A man's action—his line—can be trace:, back to the shapes made by Greek athletee, the discus throwers, on vases or in sculPturtr, but that baseball pitcher coiling himself.v_P, and unleashing the ball with such convuls1._ histrionic energy looks as if he's swingli,! into a big production number at tn"az Morosco Theatre, pure vaudeville v,,ith
inflexions. There's no possible reference hack to movement in antiquity. I saw this for myself watching a friend in the Boston Redsox team at practice without all that gladiatorial padding, so that you could see his overall structure in movement in relation to the spatial tensions of the game around him.
So the LCD Theatre, and England, are fortunate to have two such gifted Americans as Robert Cohan and Robert North to extend Mr Howard's insights into modern dance and substantiate his vision. I'll have More to say next week, like Mahler, Proust and our Mr Booker, about other ingredients of the LCDT. In the meantime, go and see them this week or next.
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