Ballet
Old contemporaries
Robin Young
Last year the London Contemporary Dance Theatre had a week at Sadler's Wells. To their surprise, they modestly claim, they sold out. Sadler's Wells, whose needs for hits manages to be both chronic and acute, has now invited them back for three weeks. It would not be the first time that the Wells has latched on to a good thing with such overwhelming enthusiasm as to extract all the goodness and leave only a tired shell behind, but one hopes that the young people from The Place will have the inventiveness and stamina to stay the course.
It is quite something that so young a company should be able to claim that it has itself given all its dancers their contemporary dance training, that in the past year it has given eleven first performances, and that in the current season it will be performing ten works created by its own people. Full marks for effort.
It was one of the home grown associate choreographers, Siobhan Davies, who provided the opening work of the season, Pilot, though frankly there was more interest in seeing how much accompaniment the soloist, Igg Welthy, could provide out of a mere Jew's harp and harmonica than there was in the rather lax and mildly amusing choreography. On this evidence one could not say that the company's latest works were breaking new ground, or being boldly experimental. On the other hand it did give the cast a reasonable showing in an intelligent and intelligible composition.
Nothing else in the programme was new, and I suppose that two at least of the works come in the category which the company's prospectus lists as 'modern classics', which gives rise to the uneasy thoughts (a) that in this field the designation 'classic' is very easily earned, and (b) that contemporary dance does not show very much sign of going places it has not already been. Paul Tayor's Three Epitaphs is a well-worn anthropoidal joke, slight but charming. When I first saw it I thought it was hilarious. Now, I fear, even the dancers are beginning to lose interest in it. Robert Cohan's duet Eclipse, performed by his two associate choreographers, Siobhan Davies and Robert North, is, unfortunately, the sort of melancholy and disjointed piece which is likely to get contemporary dance a bad name, with one of those disconnected electronic scores which have nothing much to do with anything, and a programme note that manages at once to be tendentious and to give the whole game away: -When two people eclipse each other, in the ensuing darkness their relationship slowly alters." In the ensuing darkness I quietly fall asleep. Martha Graham's Diversion of Angels is much better, but then so it ought to be. Robert Cohan was dancing in it when Graham first made contemporary dance mean anything in London, twenty-five years ago, and it was, supposedly, one of the works which inspired Robin Howard to create the whole London Contemporary Dance Theatre in the Graham image. It seems a pleasant rather than an exciting creation nowadays, but it is undeniably nice to have a piece of happy dance actually made to fit a score of real music, and listenable music at that, played with a hint of swagger by the English Symphony Orchestra. The dancing is firm and confident — not yet ethereal by a long way, but well-schooled and attractive. There is a pleasing directness in the cast's approach, and an open-hearted happiness about the whole performance which is bound to go down well.
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