The 2005 Dance Umbrella season kicked off last week with the London debut of the Forsythe Company, created after William Forsythe’s longstanding and successful collaboration with Frankfurt Ballet ended for debatable administrative and artistic reasons. The event attracted an audience of electrified Forsythe diehards, but was not memorable.
The oddly mixed programme started with two recent (2002) and complementary creations, The Room As It Was and N.N.N.N. Each work focused on an in-depth study of how movements, be they large or minute, are generated in one body and can then transfer, with variations, repetitions, additions and reactions, to other bodies. The resulting action was frenziedly seamless. There were darker tones in the first work, whereas the second veered towards slapstick comedy from a spirited, all-male quartet.
Set against a stark backcloth and punctuated by intentionally audible breathing, neither work came across as particularly provocative or innovative. Detailed exploration of movement and choreographic transferral from one dancer to another is, after all, the kind of material that has been favoured by dance-makers since the inception of choreographic postmodernism in the early Sixties. One would therefore have expected Forsythe to bestow his unique mark on such a dated formula. Alas, individual imprint was the missing ingredient. Even when, in The Room As It Was, the backcloth lifted to reveal some intentionally hidden action going on behind it, this didn’t have the impact that other, more controversial challenges to the given notion of theatre dance in Forsythe’s oeuvre have had. The success of the two pieces therefore relied greatly, if not exclusively, on the amazing individual skills of the dancers. As always with Forsythe, the performers mesmerise the audience by using their non-conventional ballet bodies in ways that transcend any technique or style.
Dazzled by such pyrotechnics of postmodern bravura, I found it difficult to adjust to the sombre atmosphere of of any if and. Created in 1995, after the premature death of the choreographer’s wife, this work belongs to that category of Forsythe’s works in which the action generates from, revolves around and/or runs parallel to different uses of written and spoken text. In this particular instance, banners with literary fragments shifted up and down while hovering above a couple dancing in-between two seated whispering figures. Although the dance is still winningly puzzling, its dramatic drive has dated slightly. In addition, the work suffered considerably from being squeezed between the two complementary 2002 creations mentioned above and One Flat Thing, reproduced, another flashy but fairly dry display of physical bravura in which the dancers interact with and within a maze made of tables.
In the same week, the world première of Cathy Marston’s Ghosts, after Ibsen’s play, offered a narrative alternative to Forsythe’s plotless works. Ibsen’s celebrated work might not come across as suitable for translation into dance, but Marston, with the support of the dramaturg Edward Kemp, has not gone for a literal dance rendition of the piece. Hers is, instead, a compact, 60-minute-long individual reading of the drama, set to an appropriately haunting score by Dave Maric. The result is a dance that stands out for structural consistency, narrative clarity and engaging theatricality. The action develops through a series of dance episodes, the majority of which are presented at the same time on the same stage. The presence of diverse choreographic numbers developing in unison is not distracting, though. By constantly de-centring the attention of the viewer, Marston heightens the drama significantly, creating a series of visually engaging tensions and counter-tensions.
Moreover, the combination of flashbacks with more ‘present’ events in the Alving household, together with the doubling of Mrs Alving’s central role — so that one woman becomes the shadow of the other — dispels the risk of a blow-by- blow transliteration, and confers engaging immediacy on the whole performance. I only wish the choreographer had not occasionally indulged in trite theatrical ideas — such as the blood-like wine that the syphilitic father pours on to his son to symbolise the passing of the contagious illness, — and had been more daring in her adaptation of the original plot. The whole episode with the pastor is utterly superfluous and detracts considerably from the work’s hauntingly subdued crescendo. Choreographically, Marston has opted for an effective, never too graphic movement vocabulary that gave her interpreters — Clemmie Sveass, Charlotte Broom, Christopher Akrill, Matthew Hart, Omar Gordon, Martina Langmann and Jenny Tattersall — more than one chance to display excellent technical and interpretative skills.
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