Diversions may officially be the Dance Company of Wales, but they've travelled a long way from home to buy their latest programme - to Finland for Tommi Kitti's Five Beginnings, and to Japan for Shigehiro Ide's Unspoken Agreement.
But neither of these works lives up to the advance reputation of their creators - and neither sits comfortably on the bodies and personalities of the eight young dancers who perform them.
On the surface, Kitti's Five Beginnings is a pure dance piece, which routes its performers round a circuit of long fluid lines and surprise formal interventions. One dancer's lone trajectory is disrupted by a sudden hesitation, or by a second dancer who tangles with their movement and forces it off course. Several dancers, performing in isolation, are drawn into quasi-ritual patterns, the choreography uniting them for a few minutes before scattering them apart.
Kitti springs these devices deftly into the choreography, and they are clearly meant to detonate strong emotional charges below the work's surface. Unfortunately Diversions' dancers are not experienced enough to master such subtle changes in physical dynamic, let alone flag up their dramatic subtext. They can just about parrot Kitti's phrases, but they cannot speak his language.
The failure of the piece isn't their responsibility alone however - Five Beginnings would be a tough sell for any cast. At 45 minutes, it feels as if it is double its natural length. And the repetitions that come from stretching its material so thin are bleakly underscored by Kitti's choice to stage the piece largely in silence.
The one thing in favour of Shigehiro Ide's Unspoken Agreement is that it contrasts so brashly with Kitti's austerity. Ide's cute commentary on the dress codes and body language of twentysomethings is a fashion statement from start to finish. Its dancers are dressed in witty combinations of pinstripes and tartan, its score is postmodern lounge music, its lighting is state of the art - and its message is unashamedly trite.
It is one of those pieces about individuals trying to find themselves in a crowd, which means that the dancers are either striving to keep up with their strutting, preening peers or mooching around in silent dissent. More experienced dancers might dig out some genuine conflict or comedy from their roles, but this cast contrive only silliness. Every reaction is manufactured, every joke is mugged to death.
Roy Campbell-Moore, the director of Diversions, can't be faulted for wanting to challenge his dancers and his audience. But he needs to pick his repertory more wisely, and acknowledge the limits of his young performers if he is to make a credible case for his ambitions.
