Dance
Rambert Dance Company (Royalty Theatre)
The American connection
Sophie Constanti
In the week that Rambert Dance Com- pany — furnished with a bumper package of six works new to London audiences opened at the Royalty Theatre, Britain's other large-scale troupe, London Contem- porary Dance Theatre, had only the resig- nation of its artistic director to announce. After less than a year at the helm, Ameri- can Nancy Duncan is going home. Her pre- decessor, Dan Wagoner (also imported from across the Atlantic), lasted marginally longer.
Unlike LCDT, Rambert does not have an umbilical tie to American modern dance. But since Richard Alston became the company's artistic director in 1986 it has developed unique and fruitful relation- ships with prominent New York choreogra- phers like Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs and, most significantly, Merce Cunning- ham. Alston has made Rambert's Ameri- can connection a key feature of his directorship, and the repertoire now con- tains such modern classics as Cunning- ham's Septet and Doubles and Brown's Opal Loop. LCDT, too, has acquired its own share of American works. But its choice and juxtaposition of choreographers Paul Taylor, Dan Wagoner — has been baffling. And Duncan's contribution pieces by Nina Wiener and Arnie Zane has only added to LCDT's stockpile of inconsequential oddities. In contrast, Ram- bert has accumulated a collection of works (both British and American) which not only reveal Alston's enthusiasm for collab- orative projects with contemporary com- posers and visual artists, but confirm his belief in dance as an independent art.
Siobhan Davies' Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues is her lushest piece for Rambert since Embarque (made in 1988). Around Freder- ic Rzewski's North American Ballads for solo piano, and the taped sounds of Lan- cashire cotton mills in full operation, Davies has built a dance in two sections. The movement echoes, but doesn't mimic, the gestures of manual labourers at the loom: reaching, pulling and winding, the inner body rhythms frequently given over to wide, deft, sweeps of action.
Alston's latest work, Cat's Eye, and the revival of his 1984 success, Wildlife, show how vibrant and focused his own choreog- raphy can be when propelled by richly tex- tured scores (Nigel Osborne's for Wildlife; David Sawer's for Cat's Eye) and placed in transformative stage environments (created in Wildlife by Richard Smith's hanging, kite-like structures and in Cat's Eye by Paul Huxley's strikingly coloured arrangements of tilted oblongs). In both pieces, the action takes place in private, secret worlds. Wildlife's space is dark, mysterious, primi- tive, but it allows for a stillness which Cat's Eye's cruel, urgent modernism shuns. Cat's Eye is Wildlife made urban. Its physicality is less earthbound and its central figure, Gary Lambert, is more playful and ritzy than any of Wildlife's brightly plumed creatures of nature. Yet Alston appears to be using much of the same vocabulary here: the diverse combinations of rounded and angu- lar movement, the pattern of dancers even- tually surrendering their individual rituals for a series of group assemblages.
This sense of individuals gravitating towards something larger and more power- ful than themselves was also evident in Touchbase, Cunningham's first work for a British company and the fifth piece he has made using the computer choreography software, Life Forms. Over the years, Ram- bert's dancers have made his Doubles and, especially, Septet their own. But Touchbase has been theirs from the start — and it shows. The speed and complexity of Cun- ningham's phrases seem to have given Rambert's men — never a fey bunch — a revitalised masculinity. To Michael Pugliese's sound-score of percussive jolts and whirrs, they spend much of the time clomping into deliciously solid, grounded positions, slapping down their soles and reorientating themselves on invisible diago- nals.
The women are demure, fleet, disarm- ingly cool. In one episode, Alexandra Dyer partners Paul Old clockwork-style, then sits pretty, head slightly cocked. The image, frozen and prolonged, is that of a lover's picnic in a Fifties movie. Two white gates attached to a post suggest a back yard, a communal open space. We see the boy- and girl-next-door, the helpful neighbour and strangers, trying desperately to mingle with the locals. Alone and detached, then suddenly locked in encounters, the dancers continually adjust their levels of intimacy with each other. Only Cunningham could create an abstract piece like Touchbase and make it read like a human interest story. And only Rambert could make it look like true Brits sampling the American dream.
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