Dance
Self-
Sophie Constants
or both of Britain's large-scale contem- porary dance troupes, 1993 has been a year of internal crisis, self-engineered upheaval and wilful destruction. Last Christmas, Rambert Dance Company's board sacked its artistic director, Richard Alston. His replacement, Christopher Bruce, is due to join the company next April — if plans to expand the ensemble and restyle it are met with adequate funding. Meanwhile, Ram- bert falls more and more deeply into an unproductive slumber.
At London Contemporary Dance The- atre, problems of leadership, vision and repertory have affected the company's development for over five years. Dogged by its failure to find an artistic director (both Dan Wagoner and Nancy Duncan proved woefully ineffectual), LCDT has now decided to end its own life. Its recent per- formances at Sadler's Wells were, for Lon- don audiences, a final opportunity to see the company in its present form: next September, the Contemporary Dance Trust hopes to embark on the first phase of a radical three-year plan. The Place — the building which houses the Trust's various activities and resources — will become the National Centre for Contemporary Dance. Richard Alston will be its artistic director and will also lead The Place Company, a group of approximately 12 dancers.
Alston, currently artist-in-residence at The Place, is one of six choreographers who contributed new works to LCDT's touring programme, The Perilous Night, a solo for Darshan Singh Bhuller, takes its title from John Cage's prepared piano 'I could do with some more press coverage.' score (written in 1943) and follows the music's six-part structure. Alston confines the dancer's nocturnal journeying to small, shifting areas of light, but it is within the surrounding cloak of darkness that the most unexpected sounds of Cage's music are caught and trapped. As the edgy, trou- bled insomniac, Bhuller is, by turns, drawn to the night and fearful of it.
Amanda Miller's The Previous Evening also features the prepared piano of Cage, although here it is borrowed from an exist- ing recording and constitutes only a small part of Fred Frith's chance edited score. Cage's most wisely documented (and applied) methods and processes of compo- sition are also adopted by Miller and her co-designer Seth Tillet who, like Frith, turn the whole exercise into a delightfully prankish and affectionate homage. Four men and four women drift in and out of strange, cabbalistic duets, crouch in dimly lit areas and linger on the blurred sidelines. Silhouettes travel across the white curtain which divides the stage, objects dangling on lengths of string are lowered, illuminated and ignored. Next to the coughs, scrapings and jangles of Frith's score, Miller's chore- ography remains speedy and buoyant motion magic of the now-you-see-it, now- you-don't variety.
More schematically ritualistic, at least in its outward appearance, is Angelin Preljo- caj's Sand Skin, a piece in which the mutat- ing linear patterns created by 14 dancers are a metaphor for communal harmony and destabilisation. At times, Preljocaj veers towards cliched lyricism — especially in his choreography for the male-female couples — and in trying to establish move- ment motifs he tends to lean too heavily on repetition as a choreographic device.
However, next to Alette Collins's Shoes, Sand Skin is a model of invention. Driven along by the Nymanesque urgency of Steve Martland's commissioned score, Shoes is a joke which doesn't quite come off, a story which is never really told. In Bernadette Iglich's isolation from the other members of the company (who, with their footwear, keep disappearing behind a screen), Collins is perhaps commenting upon a bad case of shoe envy. And in the dreary, gestu- ral semaphore traced out over and over again by the orderly, impersonal, Doc Marten-wearing chorus line, Collins merely triggers the memory of Pina Bausch's Wup- pertal Tanztheater demonstrating a more original, absurd and masterly sequence of hand and arm gestures on the same stage back in 1982.
Robin Howard, founder and patron of the Contemporary Dance Trust, always reminded LCDT of its responsibility 'to produce new and valid work'. 'If, warned Howard, 'we fall into the pattern of touring an established and safe traditional reper- toire, we deserve to die,' Ironically, LCDT has chosen to kill itself off just as progres- sive changes in its approach to dance are beginning to show.
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