The Associates at Sadler’s Wells reviewed: another acutely inventive work from Crystal Pite

The prodigious streetdancer Tommy Franzén pops up everywhere from family-friendly hip-hop shows by ZooNation, Boy Blue and Bounce to serious contemporary ballet by Russell Maliphant and Kim Brandstrup, but he’s a bit of a Macavity. He ought to be recognised as a star, but he effaces himself award-winningly in others’ work. That chameleon quality is a problem with his venture into the solo limelight, a Charlie Chaplin tribute, SMILE, on the Sadler’s Wells triple bill of associate choreographers last week.

Franzén’s mercurial moves are always thrilling to watch, and his creative extension of Chaplinesque capering into some acrobatic popping and b-boying does OK in making the Little Tramp a street brother of hip-hop’s outsiders. Still, something much funnier and more provocative is needed than ZooNation director Kate Prince’s saccharine tears-of-a-clown approach, with an autopilot Louis Armstrong and Harry Connick Jr playlist. Chaplin was a complicated figure, with unpopular sexual and political inclinations, and a mesmerising charisma. The right hat, cane and moustache aren’t enough to make even this gifted dancer arresting.

I’ve enthused about Crystal Pite before. Her duet, A Picture of You Falling, is another acutely inventive and theatrical experience. It dissects the essence of movements — hand, hip, knees — and then reassembles them into a language of intense, disintegrating passion between two people.

Spotlights are used piercingly in the darkness (by Robert Sondergaard) to separate and unite the dancers, Peter Chu and Anne Plamondon. A female voice-over makes arresting statements, written by the choreographer: ‘Look. This is you. This is a picture of you falling.’ There is an almost freeze-frame examination of the process whereby a dancer’s body hits the floor. ‘This is the place — this is where it happened,’ says the voice as the couple grapple in a troubling, increasingly hostile duet.