Ballet

Beyond words

Robin Young

The London Contemporary Dance Theatre have been industriously sallying forth into the country in evangelical teams explaining to people what contemporary dance is all about and how it works.

There is no doubt that some of it does work. The LCDT's achievement so far has been to prove that contemporary dance in Britain is on the verge of a boom into big business. When Robert Cohan, their artistic director, first came over from the Martha Graham company a decade ago the audiences were so pitiful that the company legend says the first performance at the Royal Court only went ahead because the ice-cream lady sat down to watch. But now they have eighteen in the company, 130 students in the school, and can fill Sadler's Wells to 87 per cent capacity for a six-week run. Moreover their experimental residencies in the provinces—mixing teaching, demonstrations and open rehearsals with actual performances—have almost been overwhelmed by the numbers attending.

Two weeks ago, however, LCDT were at home giving Camden Festival audiences a taste of the proselytising message they have been carrying to the country for the past ten weeks. 'We do everything in public now', Cohan announced, introducing the audience to the idea of seeing the company talked through' one of his ballets before giving it a public performance.

It would customarily be accounted .a failure for the artist to have to stand up in Public and explain his art in mere words. But it would be churlish indeed for me, who have laboured in vain to bring this particular Tree of Wisdom into bloom, to comPlain. Especially as Cohan talks with a great deal of mildly self-depreciating yet Persuasive charm and unpretentious lucidity. And yet more especially as one of the Works involved was Cell, a key work of his Which, if I can put it this way, I have frequently stumbled over in the past. In general I approve the principle that the critic should not be brought to too close an understanding of the creator's intentions and problems, lest insidious sympathy render him unreadable. But total ignorance— such as some of the modern programme notes leave us to wallow in—is not necessary either.

And Cohan's remarks did go some way to Show how unequal the struggle has been up to now. Up to a year's thinking, he said, goes into the gestation of a piece. And some ot h f the thinking has a loose allusive quality at might also prove elusive to an audience struggling to get the meaning out in fifteen minutes flat. 'T started Cell with the title Quasar. I did not know exactly what it

meant, but I knew what I thought it meant.' What he was thinking of was something which bears the seeds of its own destruction, and which goes through motions though knowing inwardly that it is doomed. Could one have guessed ?

He commissioned concrete music—`because I like the way it focuses attention on the movement. People say "at least in ballet you can close your eyes and listen to the music". I didn't want that'. He told the composer he wanted music related to the four elements 'because I didn't know what I wanted, and I thought I could not go far wrong with that.'

The first element, water, is 'the universal symbol for consciousness' and that is why the opening section is 'a social situation with people relating to each other in a personal way, with the movement having a quality exactly like talking.'

Much of the imagery is surprisingly literal. Bending from the waist with arms dangling is 'all spent' ; a girl clinging to a boy's every movement is a relationship doomed by overdependence; changing partners indiscriminately denotes social disruption and the break-up. A favourite, says Cohan, is the man who sets his legs apart and inverts two other dancers, one under each arm on the pivot of his hips. 'He turns their world upside down.'

The next section is abstract, reverses the patterns of groupings in the first, and has what always seemed to me the central Cell image—the central dancer up against a wall being searched or stripped. 'One of the deepest violations of the human being which we are all terrified of,' says Cohan mildly, after which the dancers `do what we do with the badly maimed or injured, take pictures of them.' Just by wagging crooked fingers held to the eye.

Ninety per cent of what we hope to decipher is arrived at by pure accident, Cohan says encouragingly. Styrofoam bricks fly over the walls in the strobe lighting flashes at this piece's climax, but Cohan was not satisfied with this as an ending. The final image came through when the dancer got fed up waiting for Cohan to think of something and started toying with the bricks on the floor, building a wall out of sheer boredom. 'And that was it'. In actually choreographing,' says Cohan, 'you try not to think —it stops the activity. You look for the ulti

mate gesture, which is the deepest intuitional activity externalised into movement.'

As Cohan himself said, having his recollections of what he was aiming at did not obstruct our own view of the finished work. There were still a lot of ambiguities to consider, but now we had points of reference, and cause to be grateful for new insights. I still find Cell less satisfactory than some of Cohan's work, but it will never annoy me in the same way again.

One premiere during the week : Namron's The Bronze exploits his own statuesque physique in a fantasy of summery sensuality in which he, the statue in the park, dances a tender caressing duet with a blonde in a bathing suit. The end, when a boy with a ball returns to bounce it on the statue's head and the figure falls over, seems even glibber than my synopsis makes it sound. Perhaps they just thought of it when someone was bored ? Anyway, the piece was not difficult to follow, or to enjoy.