Dance
Hot stuff
Bryan Robertson
The London Contemporary Dance Theatre's new season at Sadler's Wells is sufficiently advanced to show the clear progress made by this energetic and youthful company since the spring. The celebratory atmosphere of last week's Gala at the Wells was justified and if the planned surprise of the evening was both funny and delightful in its own right (period pieces by Isadora Duncan and Ted Shawn, reconstructed with affectionate, only mildly camp care) the evening began and ended with familiar ballets by the company's artistic director, Robert Cohan.
Beginning where Graham stopped, Cohan imaginatively imparts the freedom of movement of modern dance to an underpinning of classically-based discipline. The result is dance which often reflects the humours and obsessions — and the male and female role-playing — of modern life but with the unforced authority of tradition extended by organic rather than selfconscious or strident means. It's very much the style of the company and, if untricksy, it's anything but tame.
Khamsin, which began the evening (the hugely enjoyable Class was the finale, in which basic exercises are extended and brilliantly transformed), may have something to do with the Middle East and hot desert winds making madmen of us all, but in its earlier production the combination of insistent flutes and noisy percussion bouncing out like fanfares with imperiously athletic dancing for five boys and a girl, seemed to come across in its fast, near-cabaret exoticism.
The insistent music by Bob Downes is like a series of spectacular bumps and grinds routines which invoke the martial arts as well — and so does the hectic choreography. Cohan and Downes have expanded the work to advantage musically and choreographically, as well as simplifying the costumes. Borne aloft and flung around by four male desperados in richly coloured, often luridly lit, leotards that give the dancers a baleful presence like Tarot pack personages, Cathy Lewis's head movements have the challenging staccato abruptness of a fierce bird that's more of a match for its would-be captors. All this is terrific stuff but the ballet still begins and ends with some unconvincing rolling around in semi-darkness for dark blue cowled and gowned figures, like Arab fishermen advertising Scott's Emulsion in a gale, head down against the wind, and all that.
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