It's been 15 years since Kim Brandstrup first set up his company Arc and began his dogged bucking of trends in contemporary dance. In 1985, when abstraction and performance art were still the vogue, Brandstrup took to the stage with dances that told stories about characters with real names. Then, when fashions shifted towards the dislocated body-bruising of physical theatre, Brandstrup still stood alone, persisting with his vocabulary of neatly-crafted, joined-up, dancey steps while his younger colleagues beat themselves up in frenzies of confessional confrontation.
Brandstrup's path may have been solitary, but he's been wise to stick to it - for he has a peculiar instinct for the mechanics of narrative. Right from the start he's known how to move his action round the stage with speedy efficiency; he's had a sharp eye for dance images that convey maximum dramatic information, and an editor's ruthless commitment to essentials .
What's often been lacking, though, is a vision of his characters' inner agendas, a sense of what makes his protagonists seductive, deviant, needy, passionate or just plain ordinary. Brandstrup's dances may tell us how a story gets from A to B, but they don't often make us care who takes that route and why. However, in his latest work Elegy (currently touring with two earlier pieces Orfeo and Saints and Shadows in a programme called The Art of Storytelling), he's deliberately started with personality rather than action. And in so doing, he's made his best work to date for the British stage.
It's also the smallest he's made, for, even though his source is Dostoyevsky's novel The Idiot, Brandstrup has boiled the action down to three protagonists - Nastasya Filippovna and the two men Myshkin and Rogozhin, to whom she's erotically and spiritually bound. The choreography is divided into seven encounters which meditate on these relationships. Yet, while this makes Elegy sound like a diagrammatic love triangle, its choreography actually combines a very Dostoyevskian intensity with the vividly specific physical personalities of its three superb dancers. The result, though spare, is engrossingly dramatic.
The two men, Lee Boggess and Karl Sullivan, are startling opposites. Big, blunt Boggess moves without hesitation, imposing his physical will on the space around him while Sullivan, exaggeratedly tall and slender, seems to move as if his body is tangled up in his doubts and frailties. Joanne Fong, mercurial and hungry, is torn between them. Even as her body desires Boggess, it flinches from the crude weight of his limbs, while Sullivan gives her space, but offers her no peace. The emotions are subtly and inventively layered through the dancing of physical intelligence and glamour, but best of all is the final duet for the two men. Boggess, ready to kill Sullivan over Fong rejection's of him, is gradually sapped of all his fury by the passive energy which Sullivan seems to radiate, his body turning askance and deflecting all of Boggess's moves. This is dance telling a grown-up and genuinely original story.
At the Wycombe Swan, High Wycombe, April 24; and the Crescent Theatre, Birmingham April 26-7; then touring.
