Forget the Brit awards - no Robbie Williams here. Instead here was a triple bill of work from young choreographers under the alt-dance festival banner. Yorkshire Dance always strives to find fresh, innovative and alternative performers, and this year it has linked up with the European Youngblood network to introduce young artists from Antwerp to Lublijana, Bergen to Milan.
But this was the Brits' turn, and pick of the bunch was Robert Hylton's solo, Two Steps in Urban Classicism. A fun mix of street moves and wonderfully controlled gyrations, this was danced to an unlikely mix of Bill Cosby monologues and DJ Bizznizz creating sink-plunger gloops, chirrups and blips on the turntables.
Expressing Cosby's pithy gems through every muscle, Hylton gave a bravura performance of mime, jazz and fluid robotics that was underpinned by his pure classical line. Undulating belly-down he showed us how, in Cosby's words, snakes are cool and wear tiny sneakers to get along. Striking a jokey macho pose, he moved on to Cosby's take on masculinity and the familiarity of marriage, even managing to capture in his torrent of gestures and inventive action the horror of bodily odours.
There was a different kind of coupling in Colin Poole's existentialist game of sexual chess, Bad Faith, inspired by the writings of Sartre. Joined by Rachel Krische, Poole welded together the stages of a relationship from seduction to consummation, deceit and beyond with demanding, intimate physical moves danced to the wildest conglomeration of sounds: Britney meets Barry White, Ravel's Bolero and Debussy.
Faces deadpan at first, the couple suddenly only had eyes for each other, and in a pool of light snogged with great difficulty - he was tall, she was tiny. The balance of power shifted throughout, with surreal duos to bossa-nova beats or mimed to White. Poole flung his "lurve" object around like a toy or juddered over her orgasmically. Archly witty in places and well performed, but also long and tedious, it could have done with pruning.
Retina Dance's Inkt, the first half of a two-part work exploring the idea of poisons, soon had me reaching for the hemlock. A weird duo danced by Nadia Sellier, twitching and flailing in a business suit, and Filip Van Huffel, all enigmatic gestures and control, the piece was packed with difficult lifts and manic acrobatics but we'd been there before.
