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Britain’s oldest dance company is celebrating its 100th anniversary but this celebratory tour is decidedly no exercise in nostalgia. As the title, This is Rambert, makes clear, it’s a mission statement, a manifesto, and all about the present moment.
So no harking back to the company’s beginnings in the early years of British ballet, or the deliberate shift into modern dance in the 1960s. The Rambert brand has gone through some chameleonic changes across the last century, settling for a while into a pattern of reputable, reliable, something-for-everyone shows. Current artistic director Benoit Swan Pouffer wants to shake things up, to prove there’s nothing geriatric about this centenarian.
It’s all about keeping moving, and there is a sense of constant motion in this triple bill of recent creations. The best piece is Hop(e)storm by (La)Horde. One of the French collective’s tricks is taking dances from social and digital life and deconstructing and remaking them for the stage; recognisable building blocks retooled into something arrestingly new, like someone making a YouTube video where they edit a bunch of clips together and paste a new soundtrack over the top. In this case the dance is a 1930s lindy hop, fragmented and put through a rave filter, hooked to a hardcore beat. The result is formally and intellectually interesting, but also grabs the senses and feeds your dopamine. It’s very clever.
More than anything, Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber’s In Crimson shows off how good these dancers are, like Dipesh Verma, who has an extra notch of amplitude to his moves, and especially Naya Lovell, flying into the arms of the mercurial Sungmin Kim (later the multi-talented Lovell perches on the piano and sings, with pianist Yonatan Daskal playing live). The movement morphs between rubber-bodied shape-shifting and great gusts of expansive expression, never settling into a comfortable rhythm. They dance in front of a red velvet curtain, the stage size vastly reduced to give the feel of a chamber piece. It’s always tasteful, lovely to look at, even when they’re dealing in full-fat feelings.
Dutch choreographer Emma Evelein’s Gallery of Consequence is set in an airport, the kind of nowhere space where anything can happen. We swerve between couples’ conflict, a paranoid panic attack, gossipy airline staff and more, with wheelie-case travellers always rushing somewhere unseen and the antsy, freeze-frame movement of people stuck in the waiting zone but ready to dash at any moment. The problem with these disappearing snapshots (of people you don’t get a chance to know) is that they quickly evaporate without impact, but somehow it never gets boring.
What does this all say about Rambert’s mission, then? To move fast, but not necessarily break everything. To continue commissioning new choreography and keep a stunning set of dancers in forward motion. This is all very good, and everything tonight is good, even if only some of it really thrills – that’s the necessary risk of new work. Let’s hope they’re still dancing in another 100 years.
