Ballet operates inside a constant struggle for perfection. It tries to subdue the unruly bodies of dancers within the exquisite tailoring of classical steps, to suspend the passage of time in the rhythms of its own choreography, and to impose its gentle symmetries on a messy world.
The fact that it always, silently, falls short of its ideals can be a source of ballet's most poignant beauty. For William Forsythe, however, the tension between perfection and failure screams to be written large. In both of his works danced by Ballett Frankfurt this week the conflict between order and disorder has taken centre stage.
Eidos: Telos opens with a self-contained piece of choreography (premiered in 1994 as Self Meant to Govern) in which the dancers seem to be warring against time. Six men and women perform on a stage strewn with clocks, whose ticking and flashing mark off the unforgiving beat of seconds as the dancers articulate their elegantly choreographed response to Thom Willems's violin music.
But this initially straightforward competing of rhythms turns more hectic. The clocks go haywire, the violin is periodically blasted by the noise of three amplified trombones and the dancers' deftly detailed moves start to crumple under some severe internal stress. The world is clearly not a safe place for dance, and in the second section the danger intensifies as the work appears to be sucked into a maelstrom of deranged and destructive energy.
At the centre of this emotionally radioactive stage is Dana Caspersen, a Persephone figure, surrounded by tangles of wires and flickering TV monitors, whose dark ranting stream of consciousness sparks off a series of vengeful and psychotic bursts of complaint from her flanking chorus of dancers, until the third part of the work restores the shocked, wary dancers to a world of pure choreography.
When it is written as a simple journey from order to chaos and part way back to order again, the logic of Eidos: Telos sounds simple. But its effects are wildly uneven. Sections of Eidos: Telos possess a traumatised beauty which I have not seen on any other stage, a savage theatrical bleakness and a thrilling power of scale and performance.
In other sections, though, the dance seems sparsely imagined, the staging brittle with theory and, in the case of Caspersen's monologue, the text incoherently trite. These elements create an irritation factor which is not justified by the work's subversive logic.
At its most intense moments you feel Eidos: Telos could rank as one of the 20th century's great journeys into the underworld. At other times, it just does not seem to go the distance.
Ends tomorrow. Box office 020 7863 8000.
