“Are you reviewing the show?” an audience member says after spying my giveaway pad and pen. “I think you should say that this is the most significant cultural event that has come out of Wales in the last 10 years. It’s that good.” This isn’t a verbatim conversational account. If I quoted accurately, including all the appreciative, excited expletives, I’d lose my job, but you get the gist of the reaction to the evening. When I ask said audience member if he is generally a contemporary dance fan, he says, “Not really”, which sums up this preview of National Dance Company Wales Autumn programme as pretty much as close to perfection as you can get.The double bill opens with Romance Inverse by Itzik Galili and looks like an animated chess game. The male dancers grip on to moveable boards that they wheel around the female dancers, elaborately and cinematically framing them. Enticing, elastic and ethereally elegant, their strength lies in making new forms that have force of personality coupled with a delicate poise. In the second part of the piece, we see the choreographer play with light. Working in collaboration with the same lighting designer he has used for the past 15 years, Galili creates a world that plays optical tricks with recessive shadows and playful perspectives. A strikingly strident opener. Next up is The Biggie. It’s the world premiere of Stephen Petronio’s By Singing Light. To put this in perspective, Petronio is the daddy of contemporary dance, 35 years on the clock and a true iconoclast. Here, he has taken the iconic poetry of Dylan Thomas and given it his unique iconoclast spin. Dancers alternate between whirling and looping around each other like vines, urgent yet tender, festooning the stage in rococo tracery to circling in a slow, exhausted creep like lizards in a Max Escher print. The score by Ryan Lott is exquisite, weaving its very own distinctive spell, the music wrapping itself around the dancers and driving their movements brilliantly. Petronio characterises contemporary dance as “primal” and “elemental” and this programme proves his point. It’s challenging, affecting, erotic, visually stunning. With modern dance, there’s a real anxiety about whether we understand what we’re seeing, whether we ‘get’ it or not, when really we should just simply watch beautiful bodies doing beautiful things. If you only ever see one dance show in your life, see this. |
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Monday, September 27, 2010 |
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