In the glossy world of classical ballet, where Sylvie Guillem and Swan Lake regularly top the global box office, it seems increasingly hard for young choreographers to take their chances and junior dancers to step out of the corps de ballet and create new roles.
One exemplary project of the rebuilt Royal Opera House has been to offer the Linbury Theatre and Clore Studio as platforms for small works, with the artists' development initiative sponsoring them. Currently benefiting are Tom Sapsford (dancer with the Royal Ballet) and Cathy Marston (creator of several works for the Royal's Dance Bites series), whose joint programme, Cohabitants, is showing at the Clore.
It would be pleasing to herald their works as triumphs - Cinderella dance pieces that the big company will unhesitatingly whisk into its main house repertory. But, while both have interesting features, neither feels like a serious proposition.
In Last Days at the Empire, Sapsford has taken iconic characters and speciality acts from the 19th-century music hall and twisted them into odd, disconnected versions of themselves, the performers like ghosts caught in an old theatre. Their acts include neat pastiches - a mirror dance performed by near identical chorus girls, a mimed marionette dance, a sweetly cracked rendition of She Was Poor, but She Was Honest - but for the piece to be more than a series of diverting turns, the dance framework must be more fully evolved.
Marston's Traces, set to a distractingly polyglot score by Yann Tierson, begins with a fine fury. A group of men leap and twist in tight-knit competition. They are watched by four women and, as the piece evolves, the dancers pair off into a series of on-off relationships. Time is encapsulated, as if we were watching a speeded-up weather film.
But the piece is let down by Marston's reliance on extraneous emoting - sad looks and pouting shrugs - rather than registering feeling through the dynamics of the dance. This is bad choreography and it makes the dancers look prissy. Yet the closing duet for Edward Watson and Jenny Tattersall lifts the piece right back to where it started, a sustained piece of grown-up dancing full of information about grown-up people.
Until February 14. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
