There will be many who remember Petter Jacobsson as a principal with Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet: very blond, Swedish, elegantly precise. Since then, he’s moved into modern dance, working with Merce Cunningham and Twyla Tharp and now directing the contemporary French company Ballet de Lorraine, which he brings to London this week with pieces by two choreographers who are virtually unknown in the UK.
Andonis Foniadakis’s Shaker Loops is set to the original string septet version of John Adams’s score – although “set” is too mild a word for the hellbent determination with which Foniadakis pits his choreography against the music’s intense oscillating mass of sound.
The work opens with a single dancer whose body can only just contain the flailing turbulence of Foniadakis’s style. Initially, the frenetic windmilling of his arms and the juddering jolting force of his footwork feel too much like a crazy rant. Yet as all 17 dancers fill the stage, a fascinating logic emerges as the same movements are recycled through different configurations and the work’s precarious balance between order and chaos is sustained, even in the most heart-stoppingly dangerous moments.
If Adams’s music sets strict boundaries for Shaker Loops, the fragmented Sturm und Drang of Belioz’s Symphony Fantastique encourages Itamar Serussi to sprawl way beyond his audience’s natural attention span.
Cover starts out promisingly as a slow-moving dreamscape, populated by groups of white-robed dancers who are alternately spectators and actors in surreal vignettes of mime and dance. Couples meet in randomly impassioned quarrels or embraces; individuals hurl imprecations to invisible gods or lose themselves in games of skipping. The atmosphere is archaic and oddly haunting. But it’s a general rule that other people’s dreams are of limited interest. And at 60 minutes long, Serussi’s outstays its welcome.
• Until 14 March. Box office: 020-7304 4000. Venue: Linbury Studio theatre, London.
