Dance
London Contemporary Dance Theatre (Sadler's Wells)
A present for the men
Sophie Constant'
Middle-aged swingers are bearable, even good company, when they stick to their own era. Take Christopher Bruce, the 47-year-old choreographer who has now created two works in which he returns to the popular music of his not-so-distant youth. Bruce is known more for his early, Lorca-inspired ballets such as Cruel Garden and for the later, Amnesty-style, conscious- ness-raising exercises like Ghost Dances and Swansong, than for any embarrassing menopausal lapses (although there's still plenty of time left). In 1987, English National Ballet (then London Festival Bal- let) performed Bruce's The Dream is Over, a portrait of the life and times of John Lennon, set to nine of Lennon's most poignant compositions. Now comes Roost- er, a perfectly honed Jaggeresque strut through a selection of the Rolling Stones' greatest hits.
Created last year for the Ballet du Grand Theatre de Geneve, but remounted on London Contemporary Dance Theatre for its British premiere, Rooster is the dance equivalent of a mini-lecture demonstration on Sixties attitudes, relationships, libera- tion, excess and the generation gap: issues which, if made apparent by the Beatles, were wantonly aggravated by the Stones. Rooster is no mid-life crisis ballet but an acutely observed interpretation of tracks such as 'Play With Fire', 'Sympathy For The Devil' and 'Not Fade Away', with the choreographer not averse to poking fun at the figures he has conjured up. These include the party of ridiculously macho men, stiff and preening for the duration of the opening number, 'Little Red Rooster', and the trio of brazen, mini-skirted groupies who trail snake-hipped Darshan Singh Bhuller in 'Paint It Black'.
The mood is petulant and restless, flag- ging only when Bruce drops his amphetamine-induced imagery for brief excursions into hippy-dippy land. This is when it dawns on you that Rooster is really a present for the company's men. While in the duets to 'Lady Jane', with their hint of Elizabethan courtly manner, and in the blushful solo to 'Ruby Tuesday' the women look like redundant muses, Bruce has no trouble casting almost all the men as over- sexed Jagger clones in tight trousers and velvet jackets. And it is they who make Rooster such fun. Bruce concludes the trip with the urgent 'Sympathy For The Devil', transforming it into an hallucinatory play- back of events. If, ultimately, both LCDT and Bruce are just too wholesome to cap- ture the sense of what Angela Carter once described as the Stones' calculated affront', Bruce does at least show that a middle-aged man talking about his genera- tion is far preferable to one who wants to make a rap ballet.
LCDT's problems with Motorcade, the work it has proudly acquired from Ameri- can choreographer Mark Morris, are more difficult to locate. For the first five minutes or so, Motorcade confuses the eye with its
complex arithmetic. There is just too much happening: dancers weaving their way through multiple partner changes, then grouped as individuals or wandering in and out of the action, then in a solid, moving mass. Both audience and dancers need time to adjust to the flurry of movement, but once you relax into the piece a riot of shapes, patterns and those charming, inim-
itable games that Morris so frequently•plays with the most unlikely scores (in this
case, Saint-Saens' Septet, opus 65) starts coming to light.
Two things jar: Andrew Storer's cos- tumes — hideous, candy-coloured, knee- length body tights with sleeves in a contrasting shade to match jazz shoes — and the dancers' slightly clumsy and hesi- tant phrasing. Some of them jolly along until the end; others look either blank in concentration or worried that they could mess up. Only Kenneth Tharp and Ben Wright seem to have a confident grip on the material.
Most baffling of all, the women, as in Rooster, are a disturbingly insubstantial presence. In Morris's own company, or in Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project (for which Motorcade was originally made in 1990), there is no obvious gender imbalance. But in LCDT's Motorcade the women seem to have far less of an under- standing of Morris's choreography than the men. When they're lifted horizontally, matter-of-factly, by male partners, you guess that Morris has told them to just hang there, relax, forget about being 'dancers'. But they looked uncomfortable, as if all they wanted to do was tidy up the movement by pointing their feet. Maybe Morris is a one-company (his own) chore- ographer. For, on the evidence of Motor- cade, he and LCDT, put together, dilute rather than enhance each other.
'Then I thought, to hell with it — who can afford a divorce lawyer these days!'
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