Javier De Frutos's latest work is a homage to Tennessee Williams, a writer who reflects his own obsession with love's seesaw axis of delusion and disillusion, and shares his own unusually bleak focus on human pain. Unlike Williams's best work however, which evoked human disarray in strong theatrical form, Montana's Winter seems without structure.
The piece breaks into two mismatched halves, beginning with a solo in which De Frutos performs a kind of cross- gendered, composite neurotic. Dressed in cowboy gear and a hula skirt, he fills 25 minutes with variations on a tight-hipped, mincing jive. At times the steps expand into vainglorious strutting, but mostly they're reduced to a fidgeting seizure of low-level agitation. This, as choreography, is outrageously repetitious, yet it's made watchable by its uncanny layering of personality, its tiny rhythmic nuances allowing us to see stud and spinster, Stanley and Blanche, within the same phrase.
Part two is completely different. De Frutos is joined by five dancers who veer between excruciating self exposure and obsessive mutual engagement. None of them boast hot-house bodies and as they strip off their clothes their bare bulging thighs and unheroic genitals show their (and our) fears of imperfection. They go on to flip be tween graceless need and psychopathic aggression in images ragged and raw. We might weep for their courage, only the material in this section has little argument or characterisation to engage us.
Apart from some beautifully crafted snippets of dance, the choreography is little more than a hail of disconnected shock tactics. Like crazy people shouting in the street, we see the dancers' anguish but can't make contact. De Frutos's best work has always drawn inside its circle of pain, but watching Montana's Winter we're like tourists on a visit to Bedlam.
At the Lowry Centre, Salford (0161-876 2000), tonight and tomorrow, and the Arnolifini, Bristol (0117-929 9191), on Thursday and Friday.
