Two women starred in Dance Umbrella's closing gala on Sunday. One was the late Martha Graham, whose grandiloquent spirit was channelled on stage by the diva of all dance impersonators, Richard Move. The other was Val Bourne, who, after 28 years of being midwife, mother, director and all-purpose saint of Umbrella, has just directed her final festival. The compere of Bourne's farewell gala was, of course, Move's "Martha", who stood before us in a state of "divine turbulence" and a variety of preposterous frocks.
All the items on the programme had had some kind of intimate relationship with Bourne's Umbrella. Chronologically, they ranged from Trisha Brown's Accumulation (1971), a minimalist solo danced with deadpan panache to music by the Grateful Dead, to a brand new piece by Michael Clark, a spin-off from his current production Mmm..., which held the audience breathless with an electrifying 10 minutes of pure dance invention. Stylistically, too, the evening ranged ambitiously wide, with the insouciant ornamental baroque of Mark Morris's Love, You Have Won at one extreme, and a deliciously bruising Eurocrash parody from New Art Club at the other. In between was a revival of Aletta Collins' Stand By Your Man, danced by most of its original cast; a performance of darkly emotional virtuosity from Zenaida Yanowsky and Gary Avis in Kim Brandstrup's Afsked; Irish tap dance from Seosamh O'Neachtain and a duet by Charles Linehan.
By the time the evening revved up to its party finish, with extracts from Richard Alston's delirious Gypsy Mixture, the Wells was flying. The cheers were for the dancers; the standing ovation was for Bourne.
