Henri Oguike has rightly been dubbed one of the most musical choreographers of his generation - but he has a very particular approach to his chosen scores. What we see is not so much a visualisation of melody and pulse, but music as three-dimensional space, peopled by very specific types of men and woman.
His signature work, Front Line, is a setting of Shostakovich's ninth string quartet, organised around fierce, linear tracks of movement. As the six black-clad dancers spread out in stamping single file, their percussive moves unequivocally beat out the music's violent rhythms. Yet what we register most sharply is the confined area in which the dancers move, the sense that their collective frenzy is beating against invisible walls. You don't have to know the history of Shostakovich's struggle with the Soviet authorities to feel the howl of claustrophobia embodied in the music.
By airy contrast, Oguike's latest work, White Space, is set to harpsichord music by Scarlatti and occupies a brightly lit world of wit and artifice. Oguike's fascination with the abstract scaffolding of his music is laid out in the work's back projection, which zones in and out of a giant reproduction of a Mondrian painting. Against these geometric patterns, his seven dancers articulate their own briskly measured sequences, marking out the lines of the music in orderly configurations. Yet their mincing walks, courtly flourishes and extravagant gestures fill these patterns with lavishly choreographed doodles, allowing the baroque ornamentation of the music to take on absurd human form.
Oguike's one false move in the piece is his decision to punctuate the choreography with sequences of filmed dance. Though interestingly stylised, they break the work's careful balance between representation and abstraction. The closing pieces - a re-working of his strange, feral solo FPS and the Latin party piece Finale - confirm what we already know. Oguike has more than enough to say with live bodies to require either the help or the distraction of digital tinkering.
