Topping the bill of Rambert's latest programme is Labyrinth of Love, a new (and very newsworthy) work by Marguerite Donlon, which has as its collaborators the popular American postmodernist composer Michael Daugherty and the visual artist Mat Collishaw. The work that steals the show, however, turns out to be one that was created 37 years ago.
Like all of his greatest choreography, Merce Cunningham's Sounddance has the power to suspend its viewers in a preternaturally charged present tense. There's a gregarious theatricality to its opening, as the first of its 10 dancers bursts through an elaborately swagged back curtain – like a music-hall magician about to introduce his most brilliant acts. Much of the dancing is indeed magically acrobatic: spinning, leaping configurations patterned with dazzling sleight of hand. But against the richly buzzing soundworld of David Tudor's score, we also see the dancers morphing into odd, cellular clusters, evolving into insects and birds, inhabiting a Darwinian playground of the choreographer's imagination. I thought I knew Cunningham, but with Sounddance I feel as though I'm discovering his genius all over again.
It is a lovely idea to preface the piece with Dutiful Ducks, the graceful, tricky solo that Richard Alston created in 1982 as part-homage to Cunningham; lovely, too, to see Dane Hurst inherit the piece with a dark, jazzy intensity and lyrical finesse.
But the luminosity of these two works (and of Paul Taylor's Roses, the fourth piece of the programme) exposes the peculiar inertness of Labyrinth. Collishaw's glossily poetic video art has a disturbing theatrical presence, but the ragbag of ideas in Daugherty's score, and the inaudibility of its sung text, expose the degree to which Donlon's choreography feels like a series of smartly crafted but disconnected devices. For a piece that claims to explore the many moods of love, it leaves viewers perversely unmoved.
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