Rosas

Two Rosas outings this week, always cause for celebration, even when disappointing.

Monday's D'un soir un jour is a new, large-scale work consisting of roughly six sections to music by Debussy, Stravinsky and living British composer George Benjamin. I've never knowingly heard Benjamin's music before and both his pieces here -- one commissioned especially for this dance -- are tediously tuneless in a decidedly retro, early-20th century fashion, at once consistent with and derivative of the authentically modernist music surrounding them.

The dancing throughout is also intricately informed by modernism, and in particular by the work of Vaslav Nijinsky and the Ballets Russes. Nijinsky's L'après-midi d'un faune, with its pseudo-classical postures and louche sexuality, is one of the great iconic moments of modern dance, and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker begins with a direct quote, in silence, before proceeding -- in by far the most successful part of the evening -- to utterly reinvent the piece and make it her own. Longtime Featherstonehaugh Mark Lorimer has aged into an absolutely mesmerising dancer, and his performance of the intricate, allusive and beautifully physical faun choreography is a sight to behold.

Sadly, the rest of the evening can't hope to compete. There are occasional flashes of brilliance throughout, and it all rolls along well enough, but often seems more like a finger exercise than a finished show. The music, particularly Benjamin's, doesn't help at all, and by the time we finish with a symmetrical reinvention of another Debussy/Nijinsky ballet, the tennis-themed Jeux, it all seems a bit aimless. De Keersmaeker's version is infinitely better than the godawful campery of Nijinsky's original, but it hardly seems a piece worth rescuing and brings the evening to a much more whimpery than banging close.

The show is worth seeing for Rosas fans, but only the faun really deserves to live on in repertory.

Which brings us to the second perf of the week, the Rosas Repertory Evening, which collects together three substantial -- and diverse -- pieces from the company's more than 20 year history.

Quatuor No. 4 is one of Anne Teresa's most characteristic works, a formal, intense, playful and terrifyingly precise dance for four women to a Bartók string quartet. I've seen this before and like it a great deal, but the music is enervating and it seemed to get a bit lost in the rather soulless space of Sadler's Wells.

A large, crowd-pleasing ensemble piece to Beethoven's Gross Fugue was more straightforwardly enjoyable, extremely lively and energetic and impossible to dislike, if perhaps lacking the distinctiveness and vision we've come to expect from de Keersmaeker.

The final piece was in many ways the most remarkable -- I hated it, but all the same found it quite fascinating. Danced to an early, and unexpectedly melodic, sextet by Arnold Schönberg, and set in an unexpectedly figurative autumnal forest wreathed in mist, it was flowing and balletic and altogether schmaltzy in a way I'd have thought utterly alien to Rosas. Despite many snippets of inimitable de Keersmaeker dance vocabulary, the abiding impression was of a completely other style of dance performed by a completely other company; and what was illuminating about it was seeing just how much the musical atmosphere and romantic setting overpowered any fleeting beauty in the dance itself. Interesting, but not good.

Which leaves one more to go in the Rosasfest that's formed the heart of this year's Dance Umbrella. These may be some of the dullest posts in the history of WT, but whatever: a report on Desh will follow in due course.
Posted by matt at October 22, 2006 05:56 PM