'Ballet
Falco falters
Robin Young
"Probably the most adventurous and stimulating modern dance company anywhere in the world." says the programme note of the Louis Falco Dance Company, who are making their British debut at Sadler's Wells. It does not say much for the other modern dance companies, but in fact this one is nothing exceptional.
It pays to be wary of modern groups from America. They all come in with rave reviews from everywhere else (" packed and cheering houses" in Holland in Falco's case), and with generous advance publicity. But when they arrive it seems they don't travel so well after all, and their limitations are soon exposed.
This one is certainly no less gimmick-laden than others that have come and gone before, but Louis Falco himself, a pupil of Alwin Nikolas and graduate of Jose Limon's, is Claimed by some to stand in the front rank of modern choreographers.
The evidence deployed before a house at Sadler's Wells which was neither packed nor cheering, but sympathetic and willing to be amused, was scant. Huescape, the early work which made Falco's reputation, is a troubled and nervy piece about a triangle situation which seems more hackneyed than eternal. Louis Falco, Jennifer Muller and Juan Antonio worked up an energetic sweat over it, and ended the piece puffing like steam engines, but told you nothing more about the relationship between three people than you might deduce from chancing to see them in the street.
Twopenny Portrait is set among a score or so of bright new borrowed dustbins and has a " sound environment" (recorded elevated railway and that sort of thing) by Burt Alcantara. Louis Falco and Georgiana Holmes dressed as rather fey junkies, bump into each other, and there is some business about a stuffed doll. I was waiting for the solitary flower, symbol of hope, but I have to report, in honesty, that it never came.
Falco's other most recent work was called Soap Opera, and lived down to its title. It started with the company rolling on the floor, asking each other, " Who are you?" Then Hennifer Muller and Mary Jane Eisenberg enact the tensions between mother and daughter (" I gave you my beautiful rounded breasts your father loved so well, and you made them small " — "Mother, I have beautiful tits " — " Breasts: animals have tits. Americans have breasts "). and Muller and Falco the frustrations of marriage. Juan Antonio and Angeline Wolfe, as their pets and sexual playmates, have the liveliest parts, and the whole ends with the company rolling on the floor once more, not knowing who they are. Very trite. Jennifer Muller's Nostalgia which made up the programme is. I am told, about a disappointed, woman and her past selves. I would never have guessed it. I thought it was about three tired and dreary hoofers in platform shoes trying out jaded and hopeless dance routines to pop songs played on an old radio. I get annoyed at being asked to watch supposedly good dancers deliberately dancing badly.
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