There are few choreographers who can afford the luxury of a commissioned orchestral score. But a new initiative from new-music ensemble Sinfonia 21 has allowed Mark Baldwin to collaborate with composer Julian Anderson on the creation of The Bird Sings With Its Fingers, a work in which both choreography and score are inspired by Jean Cocteau's film Orphée.
Anderson's music is peculiarly visual. You can almost see the light-reflecting textures of its surface, the rhythmic scatter of percussion and woodwind that the orchestra send ricocheting across the darkened auditorium. It would be hard for any choreography to match its dazzling artifice and Baldwin, perhaps wisely, opts for a very spare response, his white-garbed dancers mapping out the essential geometry of the Orpheus myth rather than displaying its own virtuoso invention.
To some degree this satisfies. Baldwin's stern angels of death powerfully recall the aggressive beauty of Cocteau's three motorcycle Furies. More recognisable still are iconic images from the myth such as Orpheus's fatal gaze and Death's implacable embrace of Eurydice. Yet even though the dance is sensitive to the structures of Anderson's music a critical link seems to be missing between the choreography and the score.
Given Baldwin's meagre funding there is no way he could have afforded an elaborate stage design - but this is what the piece cries out for. Watching the dance we get an inkling of the images that may have played though the collaborators' minds as they created the work. But we need more. Without the visual fantasy of design, the choreography seems too meagre.
Paradoxically, Baldwin's settings of the programme's older scores seem more confident. In Dances Concertantes he doesn't simply articulate the phrasing of Stravinsky's music, he makes us hear the instruments as a garrulous crowd. Boisterous group dances, ditzy duets and dazzling displays conjure up a vivid scenario of an orchestra let loose in a fairground or a pleasure garden - a clever spin on the idea of dance as music visualisation.
In Louis Andriessen's monumental score The State, which closes the programme, there are echoes of Stravinsky, John Adams and many other composers, but Andriessen's towering, jagged structure is all his own. Baldwin has only eight dancers with whom to scale the music's heights, but he uses them to maximum effect, pumping limbs in machine-driven rhythms, drilling bodies along industrial lines. The tension he creates barely allows the audience to draw breath. This is a heroic programme and it deserves a wider showing than its current, restricted tour.
At the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester (0161-273 4504), on April 5.
