Over the last 19 years, BalletBoyz has metamorphosed from the founding duo of Michael Nunn and Billy Trevitt, to a raw and ready gang of 10 young men, to the current seven-strong group attracting top-flight talent – including award-winning Liam Riddick, the latest recruit.
This current crop are not only dancers but – on the evidence of Them, the first half of this double bill – budding choreographers too. Them was devised democratically by the company themselves, which could have been a car crash but has turned out to be a fantastic piece of dance: thoughtful, fresh and finessed.
The choreography was made in parallel with Charlotte Harding’s excellent string score, and dance and music are clearly, pleasingly, in cahoots. Harding’s music is spare but rich: it has melody but never predictability with its riffs, clear statements and space in between, and the dance follows suit. Much of the movement came out of improvisation and feels authentic, naturally evolving from shrugs and handshakes and inner impulses. It’s not virtuosic or demonstrative, it’s the dancers being aware of how their skin (or the 80s tracksuits they’re wearing) moves through the air. The partnering is casual and dexterous, far from any cliches of muscular and explosive “male” dancing or romantic pas de deux. Them is immensely watchable but still serious dance.
If these dancers are neophyte choreographers, Christopher Wheeldon is at the other end of the scale. Last year he made a short duet for BalletBoyz, Us, which he has extended into a half-hour piece, but the new prequel section for the whole company feels like an inharmonious add-on. The climactic duet reaches deep into two men’s connection, brimming with tenderness and sensual strength, their bodies interlocking, counterbalancing or pulling each other into flight. But what precedes it is anonymous, colourless and despite a sophisticated sense of composition, a bit on the basic side – as if you can see the counts. And it’s drowned by the heavy emotion of Keaton Henson’s Philip Glass-ish score. Luckily, when that duet arrives, Us ends on a high.
At Sadler’s Wells, London, until 9 March. Then touring.
