The final event in the Clore Studio's mini-dance season was given over to a new work, for 10 dancers, by Mavin Khoo. Produced via the Royal Opera House's Back Garden Project, Images in Varnam has been an experiment both for the Royal Ballet (one of whose dancers appears in its Asian/western choreography) and for Khoo himself, who has rarely created work on such a large scale. It has certainly been the Back Garden's most interesting hybrid to date.
The piece is based on a 12th-century Indian love poem, which has been transposed from a young girl's sexual awakening to a pungent celebration of male eroticism. At its centre is Khoo himself, a dancer of arresting exoticism and ambiguity. In his mastery of the filigree detail of the Bharata Natyam dance form, the stretchy symmetries of ballet and the blunt physicality of modern dance, Khoo is a rare stylistic butterfly. But his delicately boned body is also peculiarly unplaceable, possessing both a muscular power and a silky, secretive elegance.
In Images in Varnam these ambiguities are exploited to breathtakingly sexual effect. Khoo's opening solo displays him as a kind of male temple dancer, decorative yet aloof, but in subsequent duets he becomes both object and agent of unsettlingly ruthless desires. In the arms of Richard Curto (stocky, pale and almost doggedly intent), Khoo seduces and hungers, trembles in anticipation and lashes out with impatience. The effect of barely contained explosion is not just created by the dramatic physical contrast between the two men but also by the expressive range of Khoo's own choreography, which is at once formally disciplined and brutally explicit.
The couple are mirrored by a pair of male/female lovers, in which it is the man, Antoine Jully, who sets the agenda. The dynamic concentration of Khoo's choreography for Jully makes the latter not only a glamorous hunter of women but obliquely the object of the other two men's erotic interest. The rest of the women are little more than a decorous chorus and the choreography Khoo gives them is so bland that sometimes you wonder why he bothered. They do, though, have some kind of formal poetic purpose, waiting to be shattered by the egotism and urgency of sexuality. And Khoo, who has so much less experience as a group choreographer than as soloist, possibly doesn't yet know how to make ensemble work for him. Credit should go to the Back Garden Project for giving him the chance to try, and for showing us that Khoo is much more than an exotic one-man show.
