Last year, when I reviewed The Sum of Parts, the community-oriented piece produced by Connect, Sadler’s Wells Creative Learning department, I thought it wouldn’t be possible to do any better. Well, I was wrong, as this year’s Compass was an even more breathtaking experience. The new project, which involves more than 100 non-professional performers and a unique roster of artists, has been conceived at a time when World Cities 2012, Pina Bausch’s retrospective of works devoted to cities and cultures from around the world, is imminent. Compass, however, focuses only on London, which is a vibrant melting pot of diverse and complementary cultures.
It is this idea of celebrating distinct identities and of combining them in a dance communion of different skills, ages and abilities that is an absolute winner. The result is a one-hour-long visual and aural feast enhanced by filmic and photographic interventions by Tal Rosner and Gigi Giannella, and a great score by Donna McKevitt and Hannah Peel — partly played live by Peel herself and James Field. Yet it is the dancing that steals the show, for it is a highly and refreshingly inventive combination of ideas derived from the joint collaborations of today’s most important and illustrious dance-makers: Nienke Reehorst and Helder Seabra from Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Eastman, Felix Bürckle and Pascal Merighi from Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Paul Blackman, Mafalda Deville and Christine Gouzelis from Jasmin Vardimon Company and Michela Meazza from New Adventures.
Watching the action made me wonder where one draws the line between professional and non-professional dance, for all of the more than 100 participants looked like seasoned dancers. Their intense and clearly enthusiastic involvement, moreover, highlighted the role that the theatre — represented here by Jane Hackett, Connect co-director, and her team — plays with and for the community.
A few evenings later, Scottish Ballet presented in the same theatre its new work A Streetcar Named Desire, a rather intriguing piece of narrative dance theatre. Directed by Nancy Meckler and choreographed by Annabel Lopez Ochoa to Peter Salem’s splendid score, this new work stands out for its treatment of Tennessee Williams’s original text, aptly reworked in a performance in which, bar one exception, there are no spoken lines.
The plot, inspired by the first title Williams gave to the play, The Moth, revolves around the life of Blanche Dubois, intensely portrayed by Eve Mutso. We are thus given a chance to assimilate and appreciate the events that inform her complex and tragic psychological make-up, from her carefree youth to her final descent into madness. The ghost of her gay suicidal husband Alan (Victor Zarallo) haunts her throughout her life, becoming a dramatic and choreographic leitmotiv. The character of Stanley Kowalski, therefore, loses some of the centrality he has in the text, even though his presence remains charismatically haunting. I only wish the dancer Tama Barry hadn’t had to shout his wife’s name, as that is a far too dangerous reference to Marlon Brando’s iconic and unrepeatable scream.
Overall, the work is seductively dark, and provides the soloists with good opportunities to shine in a well thought out choreographic layout. Yet at times the action drags a tad and some minor cuts would be, in my view, highly beneficial. Still, this is a rare example of what narrative dance ought to be: neither too literal nor too metaphorical. No wonder it is a success.
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