Rambert is back in town with an outstanding triple bill at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre.
The curtain lifts on Rambert’s Dark Arteries, the first of the evening’s dances and the title of their latest tour, to reveal an immediate wow-factor - the Whitburn Band, 18-time Scottish brass band champions, and a magnificent sight to behold. The stage is dark, the floor like a black, glassy pool reflecting the glare of the instruments. Inspired by the 30th anniversary of the end of the miner’s strike, the space feels as though underground, and as this now-colliery band strikes up, the mournful sound of brass steers the soul towards a particular time and place.
Choreographer Mark Baldwin likens the discordant deep booming of the opening tubas to whales coming up for air. The dancers, in deep purples and blues, lift and fall, swarming in formations reminiscent of shoals of fish, but their ponderous progress and jerky movements belie the exertion of human effort. Moments of silence are followed by pure percussive interludes, where the dance’s focus is on rhythm not flow. Parts of the music resemble the type of jazz that someone once described as sounding as though the instruments were all falling down the stairs at the same time, accompanied by frenetic movements starkly lit by split-second spotlights flashing on and off, it induces a sense of urgency and danger.
Dancers in cat-suits - males in red, females in dark blue - perform fluid duets, the unmistakeable symbolism is of arteries and veins. The fading notes of bells from a village church echo the receding memory of a way of life, once vital, now consigned to history. This evocative piece contains elements of the local and universal, the immediate and the ancient, its timeless quality both melancholic and majestic.
Following an interval, and with a traditional orchestra now back in their customary pit, we are presented with the second performance of the evening. The 3 Dancers was inspired by Picasso’s painting of the same name that was itself inspired by a tragic love triangle. Cubism is the theme for all aspects of the design. The three dancers, all in white, are mirrored by another three: dressed in black they are barely visible against their dim, dark surroundings. They echo and shadow their brighter counterparts in sequences that repeat movements of stimulus and response, cause and effect, action and reaction, hold and release.
To music that is intermittently harmonious and lyrical, or discordantly whining through descending scales, the dancers display contained emotion and emotional control. There is an unmistakable, synchronised mutuality and interdependence as the males and female in each trio suspend, support and hang from each other as though all are fluid cells in a complex organism. However, in this three-sided relationship, some have more control than others, and when the music takes on the sounds of a hurdy-gurdy accordion this apparently symbiotic relationship takes a more sinister turn, as one dancer pulls another’s strings, dancing him around the floor like a demented marionette. This is clean, crisp and almost clinical in its near-faultless precision.
The final performance of the evening is Transfigured Night. The title comes from a piece of late-19th Century music that takes as its starting point a poem by Richard Dehmel, in which a woman confesses to her lover that she is pregnant with another man’s child. Choreographer Kim Brandstrup (twice Olivier Award winner) was stylistically inspired by the paintings of Egon Schiele and the desperate vulnerability of the people in his images.
Set in three parts, the first enacts the scenario that the lovers’ relationship is left devastated and irreconcilable by the revelation of betrayal. In a shadowy light, the shamed and sorrowful woman with bed-head blonde hair and in the red, slip-dress of the harlot, tries to reach her lover who maintains a dignified distance, occasionally allowing, in his abject desperation a fleeting, unbearable touch. Other dancers, dressed in black, move around the floor forming pathways and routes that must be navigated and negotiated if they are to find each other.
The second part is an ideal scenario of forgive and forget in which the lovers, dressed in white and bathed in sunlight perform handstands, somersaults and other motions of the carefree acrobat or child at play. The final scenario is more realistic than the second but as equally poignant as the first. The dappled light depicts hope, and as the two reach for each other, avoid each other and take the first, tentative steps towards reconnection, the relationship is shown in all its beauty and grief. Exquisite.
The standard of dancing is, as always, exceptional. What allows the dancers to convey layers of meaning that resonate and connect with their audience in these performances in particular is Gavin Higgins’ music in Dark Arteries, the design elements of Kimie Nakano’s in The 3 Dancers and the virtuoso choreography of Kim Brandstrup in Transfigured Night. A thoroughly compelling evening’s entertainment.
26th – 28th November