You need a lot of patience to watch contemporary dance, staring hard as unfathomable things unfold, hoping for revelation. You never know in advance whether light will break through, or whether you will be stuck in the clouds of uncomprehending irritation for ever.
Dance Reflections, the new festival sponsored by French jewellery house Van Cleef & Arpels, has proved the point. It has undoubtedly been a good thing, bringing new work (a lot of it French) and excellent modern dance revivals to London.
But it has also tested the viewer’s staying power in pieces such as Gisèle Vienne’s This Is How You Will Disappear, in which nothing happened in a very foggy wood for a very long time. Its clunky dialogue – “If you do not do this perfectly, I will kill you and throw your body in the river” – and the non-appearance of the birds promised in the programme (replaced by dogs) made it almost unendurable.
The revival of Lucinda Childs’s early experimental pieces by her niece Ruth Childs and three talented dancers offered different challenges. The works have a mesmeric, repetitive quality as part of their DNA. In Calico Mingling, the intricate pattern of repeated movement grips and binds; other pieces such as Reclining Rondo are so slow and transfixing that they become soporific.
Boris Charmatz, darling of radical dance, was the week’s main attraction and his first offering, a solo called Somnole, was also a meditation on sleep, or at least those boundaries between sleeping and waking when the body and mind take on a life of their own.
Charmatz, dressed in a pleated, patterned skirt, whistled as he danced, sometimes tunelessly, sometimes with snatches of a tune from the Pink Panther to spaghetti westerns. Sometimes he made bird noises, as his movement ricocheted from the still and grounded to the frenetic. Padding, skipping, running, raising himself on his elbows in a back stand, nearly dozing off before throwing himself into a frantic tap dance, he was always utterly compelling.
His cleverness and curiosity were on full display in the group work Infini too, which took place on the Sadler’s Wells main stage, with half the audience sitting at the back. It takes the idea of counting – which dominates the way most dancers remember steps – and turns it on its head, so that the repetitive sequences become explorations of mathematics, philosophy, and history.
The constant numbers are accompanied by movement from Charmatz and four exceptional dancers that seems erratic but recalls the classical origins of dance and also, as the 70 minutes progress, reveals its own shape and pattern, travelling from joyous to frightened, as the light turns yellow and the dancers cling together in shifting tableau.
It’s a challenging piece, made more so by Yves Godin’s lighting, which relies mainly on constantly revolving and very bright light. But its austere oddities finally come together in a conclusion that is thoughtful and somehow just. It’s a piece to admire rather than love, but definitely worth the attention it demands.
Star ratings (out of five)
Gisèle Vienne ★
Lucinda Childs & Ruth Childs ★★★
Somnole ★★★★
Infini ★★★
