Feet of endurance
Giannandrea Poesio
Entity
Random Dance, Sadler’s Wells Paradoxical as it might sound, ballet’s rebirth is happening thanks to (and within) modern and postmodern choreography. Over the past 20 years, classical dance, considered by many to be a dead art, has attracted the interest of many non-classical dance-makers. While some have successfully revised and reinterpreted the narratives of the classical repertoire, others have opted to tackle more directly the classical vocabulary, which remains a fertile and apparently inexhaustible source of inspiration and choreographic material. The British dance rebel Wayne McGregor belongs to the latter category, even though both his approach to and uses of the classical idiom differ greatly from those of William Forsythe — allegedly the first to challenge and revisit ballet’s vocabulary and syntax — and his numerous followers.
McGregor does not quote the principles of the classical techniques; neither does he develop his own distinctive vocabulary from an adaptation of ballet’s tenets. In his most recent choreography, ballet seems to be both a point of departure and a point of arrival for many of its splendidly non-balletically conceived choreographic phrases. Indeed, such a treatment of classical dance was one of the winning ingredients of Chroma, the mesmerising 2006 creation for the Royal Ballet — for which he is now resident choreographer.
In Entity, his newest creation for Random Dance, presented at Sadler’s Wells last week, the utilisation of classical canons is even more evident, though never in an intrusive, trite way. So is what could be referred to as the ‘cyclical’ structuring of his dance phrases, which begin at a classical starting point and conclude with another classical pose. Classical poses, adopted with great precision by the stunning, classically chiselled bodies of Random’s dancers, thus signal the beginning and the end of the numerous different and varied sections, whether short ones or not.
In between, the dancers’ bodies move out of any classical tradition to engage in a series of ideas that, in this particular choreography, seem to derive more from dance forms that are not specifically theatrical, such as street dance and the latest movement trends one finds in disco/clubbing culture. Starting from a perfectly achieved fifth position, the dancers bend, wriggle, hunch, contract, literally and metaphorically stepping out of the norm, namely ballet’s rigid syntax. The movements, therefore, are surprisingly unpredictable, and provide an engaging feast for the viewer’s eyes. Alas, the tension created by this unpredictability and the cyclical structure of the phrasing does not hold for the whole duration of this one-hour-long dance piece. By the time the music shifts from Joby Talbot’s daunt ing score to Jon Hopkins’s more thumping rhythms, the dance has become a repetition of what has been seen before, with dire consequences. Unlike Chroma, in which the crescendo of the various choreographic ideas draws upon an almost mathematically conceived game of themes and variations, in Entity this same game is played in full in the first part only, which leaves the second deflated and without drive. Even a number of projections, which appear on the swinging walls that surround the dance space, fail to compensate for the repetitiveness of the dancing. Oddly enough, the films portray molecular and bacterial behaviour (which is what Entity draws upon): constantly renewed but never repetitious.
The whole work is a splendid vehicle for Random Dance, a company that stands out for fine precision and superb technical abilities. Encased in Patrick Burnier’s monumentally spacious, though dauntingly confining set, the dancers go through what seems to be a humanly unsustainable task, never slacking or losing momentum. Indeed, it is difficult to establish to what extent the thunderous ovation at the end of the world première was a tribute to their admirable efforts rather than to the work itself.
Pure dance is difficult to handle, especially in such large quantities. In the past McGregor has clearly demonstrated his ability to create theatrically vibrant works, but I am afraid that this time he has gone more than a step or two too far.
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