Dance
More of the same
Giannandrea Poesio
soon as the curtain fell on the opening night of Irek Mukhamedov & Company last week, an elderly bal- letomane commented rather loudly, 'Some new faces, same old tricks!' I could not have agreed more. One year after its suc- cessful debut at Sadler's Wells, the com- pany has come back with a programme that was too similar — if not identical in parts — to the one presented previously. Whether this was because of some obscure artistic policies or stemmed from a sudden shortage of ideas and/or funds is difficult to say. Whatever the reason, it was not a happy choice.
Forget the performing effervescence and the rejuvenating tongue-in-cheek approach to ballet that underscored last year's per- formance. Instead, this year's programme is a more sterile display of what one could refer to as bravura numbers had there been any bravura. I am not referring here to the numerous little accidents that marred the ill-fated opening night, but to far more irritating stylistic and technical carelessness that underscored most of the dancing. The duet from Frederick Ash- ton's The Dream, for instance, would have benefited from a great deal of polishing, for it looked tragically unrehearsed. Nei- ther of the two allegedly promising dancers from the Royal Ballet, Alina Cojocaru and Hubert Essakow, seemed to have grasped or understood the intricate webs of stylistic subtleties of the piece. Similarly, The Talis- man pas de deux, danced by Mara Galeazzi and Vladimir Grigoriev, lacked an appro- priate reading of both the style and the idiosyncratic balletic mannerism that char- acterise this rarely performed 19th-century work.
Debatable liberties and a lack of stylistic awareness also affected the two duets derived from the Soviet repertoire. Those who have seen the Moskowski Waltz danced as it should be, either on film or on stage, know that it focuses on the 'heroic' acro- batics prescribed by the canons of a politi- cally informed kind of choreography. Once the flashy tricks are performed without the necessary panache and with a too cautious and safe approach, as they were on stage at Sadler's Wells, the essence of the dance goes immediately.
Some panache and a better understand- ing of the required style were to be found in the duet from The Flames of Paris another propaganda ballet from the old Russian repertoire. I did not understand, though, why one of the duet's most famous features had been arbitrarily removed. It is in the coda that the ballerina performs a sequence of fouettees (quick turns on one point while the other leg opens laterally and then closes, quickly whipping the sup- porting one), changing where she focuses her eye every four fouettees. I have no doubts that a dancer such as Natalia Ogne- va, one of the few with a true sense of style and a brilliant technique, would have had no problem in tackling such a tricky sequence.
As for the new pieces presented within the same evening — Darshan Singh Buller's Sita and Gillian Lynn's Some you win — there is little to say, for they were clever, yet unimpressive showcases for the evening's two superstars, Mukhamedov and Altynai Asylmuratova. The only novelty that left me pleasantly surprised was William Tuckett's Unobtrusive Detail, an intriguingly post-modern and highly the- atrical duet danced with gusto by Nichola Davies and Martin Harvey.
Fortunately, Regine Chopinot's La Danse du Temps at the Barbican counter- acted the disappointment of the first dance event of the new season. Although La Danse du Temps might not be to everyone's taste, there is little doubt that this one hour and ten minutes-long work stands out for its superbly refined theatrical tension. A leader as well as one of the forerunners of the French equivalent of the British New Dance, Chopinot draws constantly upon a well-established tradition of theatrical for- mulae that find their roots in the early days of the theatre de recherche. Beyond any pos- sible reading or attempt at defining the dance's content, the most fascinating com- ponent of La Danse du Temps is its move- ment vocabulary. Apparently simple and mostly pedestrian, the choreographic text of this work relies on a thoroughly worked- out research of different ways of employing a wide range of movements without ever letting the more exterior visual solution overwhelm the subtle and intoxicating game of tensions and counter-tensions that informs the whole. The calibrated use of the space and most of all the splendid per- formance of first-rate artists — the cast included those two great masters of the French New Dance, Francoise and Dominique Dupuy — added greatly to this work of pure genius. A splendid start for the new season of modern dance.
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