Benoit Swan Pouffer took over the artistic leadership of Rambert at the end of 2018, and although his plans for the reinvention of Britain’s most significant contemporary company have been disrupted by Covid-19, the direction of travel is becoming clear.
In the works he has commissioned for livestreaming, filmed at the company’s base on London’s Southbank, Rambert’s talent are asked to become actors as much as dancers, to use their voices and their qualities of physical impersonation as much as to move. The latest, Rooms, by the Norwegian choreographer and director Jo Strømgren, is a sophisticated and beautiful piece of dance theatre, but like Rambert’s previous piece, Draw from Within by Wim Vandekeybus, interesting rather than wholly satisfying.
Rooms takes the idea of confinement in adjacent spaces to move surreally between 36 contrasting scenes, with 17 dancers impersonating 100 characters in 1,000 costumes. That last detail is significant. The performers are as much quick-change artists as psychological truth-seekers as they switch between embodying Hasidic Jews, strange cultish monks, American spies, battling couples, tangled lovers and a mourner crying over the wrong urn. A policeman searches for a cannabis grower who climbs away; demonstrators protest, legs akimbo, banners swaying. A woman wins a Rubik’s Cube contest while a man contemplates suicide.
The images unfold with the strange logic of dreams, suffused in beautiful light and designed by Strømgren himself to resemble paintings. The score, which ranges from Moonlight Serenade to Bach, and Emma Dalesman’s sumptuous cinematography, catch the shifts in mood from unsettling violence to trancelike meditation. The action is often watched; people peer through windows like baffled detectives.
The skill involved is breathtaking, and the fragments striking. But they skate along the surface rather than probing too deep. For all its skill, the piece hints at subjects it can’t quite be bothered to explore. It focuses on variety rather than depth, smarts instead of significance. I wanted more.
