Arts
More night music
8rYan Robertson If I had several millions, which I've been expecting with mounting impatience for several years now, I'd give one of them to Robin Howard, the founder of the London School of Contemporary Dance and its Theatre company, to keep up the good work and hell) his Trust build the facilities now badly needed by his students, dancers and choreographers. It would be like investing in the emergent Sadler's Wells ballet back in the 'thirties. One of the awkward things for a dance elinPany that can come with success and °Incial recognition is the way in which even Todest income from official sources depends for its continuance upon heavy educational activity from all concerned. The burden of work assumed now as a matter of course by ',NI! Howard, Robert Cohan, his Artistic rirector and Principal Choreographer, and ,heir colleagues is formidable both at the s'chool and with the LCD Theatre's incessant tours around England and abroad. For the dancers, the strain is ferocious: rehnanY months each year on tour where new °ret)graphy has to be learned and rehearsed all the time while performing and r tehearsing the current repertoire—most of the choreographers are dancing regularly as then back to the Wells for more w°ndon seasons and presentations of new ti°11(s—and there's the teaching, the educa2nal involvement and commitment. These \v"Ien and women are heroes, for fourpence a easier or whatever they get. It would be of if they modified the continual thrust V tnzybiallets, but you have to have a lot of n any art before the merit or the , 'nue can be found and the invention un:eashed. The LCD Theatre clearly believes nr "ng full blast so far as new choreogevaPhY is concerned; I like the way in which ine4r,_Y.h°dY is encouraged to do their stuff, this sense, and I think the swift pace is tphrobablY all right in these early years do°1Igh it's time now, I also believe, to calm the a bit, to consolidate and refine upon ne already huge repertoire. „,,r•Inch of the taste and a lot of the imagiztive energy comes from Robert Cohan, of urse, but I said last week that Robin th°ward, the Director General, was one of reallY great reforming Englishmen in the su'tive and performing arts and expressed „Trise at the unprecedented speed with 'enich his vision had become a reality in five ars from nothing, zero, to absolute authority I said also that Mr Howard was 41" exact and measured man, so that the high t)illentum and directness with which he has Dr oDelled everything along was disconcert.? g. A tall, quiet, powerfully built man, beVectacled and bearded, Mr Howard's pre sence suggests an amiable version of Prof. Challenger and he is certainly as obsessive in the pursuit of his own mission as that irascible explorer of The Lost World. Mr Howard walks with a stick because of bad injury in the 1939-45 war. The first thing he did when he arrived in France, before brave and gallant action with the Scots Guards, was to insist on milking a field of cows, long overdue, with his fellow guardsmen. So he is sensible and practical as well as a man with a vision and a mission. Later, he became an enthusiast for Martha Graham's innovations in dance and was incensed when the nervous London managements wouldn't take on her Company for a season in the early 'sixties. He rang Lord Harewood,and between them they sponsored the appearance of the Martha Graham ballet in London in 1963. Later, Mme. Rambert encouraged Mr Howard to go ahead and start his own school—as she was encouraging everyone around her at that time, as usual, to push ahead and study the new language in dance. Coming from a wealthy background, Mr Howard has thrown everything into his pioneering venture: pictures, libraries, land, rare bibles, as well as arousing the enthusiasm and financial help of others. But material assets soon evaporate or can be vulgarly deployed: what has counted is Robin Howard's iron will and calm persistence. It was an inspired act to appoint Robert Cohan as Principal Choreographer. If it is true that Balanchine has the most profound musical sensibility of any choreograPher, and watching Agon I believe it, I believe that Cohan has the most sensuous and subtly erotic sensibility of all the choreographers around. Glen Tetley, MacMillan and one or two others have given dancers marvellously inventive things to do but they always look as if they're dancing. Cohan has this acute sense of men and women together and the shifting tensions of their complicity, the rise and fall of their aggressions and mutual dependencies and the way they support or reject each other under different pressures. I am bewitched. Cohan seems to have an awareness of the whole history of ritualised human congress in his bones, at his fingertips: I see the veiled references to erotic Indian sculpture," to Minoan painting or archaic Greek friezes but it's never selfconscious or just arty, the human feeling
flows too strongly for that.
As the biggest voyeur in the business, skulking for hours behind dark glasses on beaches until friends, fearful of impending arrest, drag me away, I do enjoy the subtlety, the high altitude, of Cohan's erotic flair (best seen in his recent and magical Forest) but I don't want to falsify his balance as a choreographer. Nympheas, to Debussy Preludes and referring, in allusion only, to Monet's late paintings of vvaterlilies, is an extraordinary invention. In dead white space, the dancers seem to lean back on nothing, floating against the supporting pressure of invisible water. Cohan has a strong sense of the processional, the frieze in movement, so dancers in rising and falling slow motion progress along a white ramp at the back, like tendrils of plants drifting in water. Chiese's patches of colour on the dancers' leotards change hue through shifts in lighting—Cohan, I should say, does a lot of the lighting for LCD Theatre. The example of Jean Rosenthal, who transformed stage lighting with Noguchi and Graham, was only slowly absorbed here but Cohan knows all.this and has learned from the 'sixties lightshows as well. His slow moving and baleful Orpheus and Eurydice ballet No Man's Land brilliantly extends the allure of apparently inconsequential or casual gesture if it is italicised, as it were, and made eloquent through ritual sense— somebody wandering vaguely along a seashore who suddenly stops and skims a stone over the water—or does a cartwheel— for no known reason is what I mean. A bridge-like lighting deck is pushed slowly around the stage, at intervals, somebody slithers down or paces across it, lights flash and change: in the corner in a glass tank Barry Guy plays his frenetic electronically amplified solo for double bass—it's terrific.
There has to be something wrong in this Arcadia, or both they and I will lose credibility. There is, but they're trifling and sometimes caused by restrictions imposed over the company by circumstance. We all love Sadler's Wells but it's a smallish boxlike stage, so that some choreography by Cohan and his colleagues seems a shade repetitive: strong diagonal movement, interesting lateral 'processionals' but less sense of centripetal and centrifugal movement for groups of dancers. That small stage means that with one huge leap you can practically enter left and exit right in. one go, so that entries and exits seem too incessant sometimes. There's always a danger of family feeling, that's good for esprit de corps, getting too closed to outside news and influence: LCD Theatre could widen its range of music and design without loss.
They have a beautiful dancer and a great choreographer in Siobhan Davies. Miss Davies is noble and tender as a dancer, with total intelligence in her body; her chor
eography for Diary 2 has, like Mr Cohan's work, extended my sense of life and I'm grateful. That's all I dare say now before I get hauled off by one of those long poles with a hook on the end.
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