The astonishingly rich programme of the first Dance Reflections festival, spread across three major London venues, is an opportunity not only to see a range of what you might call non-classical dance, but to catch cross-currents between artists, styles and times. Its opening night paired a brand new creation with an iconic work from 1979.
Contemporary dancer Brigel Gjoka and “abstract b-boy” Rauf “RubberLegz” Yasit first met as performers in William Forsythe’s superlative Quiet Evening of Dance, and their duet Neighbours echoes its trajectory: a stark opening section, dense with motion but performed in plain clothes and unadorned by music, gives way to more theatrically lit, dressed and accompanied dances, flush with moods and meanings. It’s like seeing the work’s bones first, and only then its flesh.
The bones, here, are not only the two distinctive performers – Gjoka both poised and fleet, Yasit slipping through the ribbony knots of his own limbs – but also the remarkable detail of their interaction: little parries and feints, locks and tugs and weaves. When it arrives, the spellbinding music (played live by Ruşan Filiztek) layers Turkic drones, chants and beats over the dance, and suddenly we not only see the physical structure of this particular encounter, but seem to sense a place, people, histories that are elusive, but potent.
Lucinda Childs’ now classic Dance (performed here by the Lyon Opera Ballet) was made in an era when systems theory and structuralism were in the zeitgeist – and it shows. The work is all about composition: the relation of one element to another, the formation of complexity from simplicity. Dressed in celestial white, the dancers use a limited lexicon throughout – little more than step, hop, skip and jump – balletically styled, and performed without affect or affectation. In section one, they skim from side to side across the stage. In section two, a soloist travels either in a straight line, or in a circle. In section three, the groups square up, or do diagonals.
Around, in front and above them, a reshot version of Sol LeWitt’s original film of the work multiplies the dancing figures as well as their angle and scale. It’s all of a piece with Philip Glass’s music: steps, images, bodies and sounds refracted into cosmic harmonics that echo in the mind long after the performance is over.
The Dance Reflections festival continues at Sadler’s Wells, the Royal
Opera House and Tate Modern until 23 March.
