A company of bright sparks, the Ririe-Woodbury dancers will open your eyes. Recreating the abstract joys of Alwin Nikolais' kooky creations, this light-painted dance sculpture has a visual impact hard to resist. It's like sucking Love Hearts.
Playing piano for silent movies in the 1930s, Nik (as he was known) studied music, worked in a theatre, saw German modern dancer Mary Wigman and became a puppeteer to subsidise his subsequent dance classes in Connecticut.
The result of this all-round training was an international career as dance inventor extraordinaire, taking off in the 1950s and lasting until his death in 1993. Part of the post-war race to change the world, when science, art, space, fashion, music and design were surging into new territory, Nik's dance theatre was something new and exciting.
Lythic from Prism, Tensile Involvement and Noumenon Mobilus, all from the 1950s, beautifully illustrate his magic touch. Pattern, shape and colour is all. Brushing the human element confidently aside, Nikolais moulds his dancers into other things - Nefertiti vases come alive, spidery creatures inhabit a giant web of ribbons and men in silver sacks are molten Oscars. Crafted in their entirety - choreography, costume, lighting, soundtrack - by him alone, these visions fizz and whirr in a sophisticated but childlike world of their own.
There are seven pieces in this programme - unusual among today's triple bills or full-length hour-long-plus pieces. All, including the six-part Mechanical Organ, are short snaps of dance living for the moment like fire works. And there is contrast all the way. The three 1950s dances are angular with mechanical flair. The other four, all from the 1980s, introduce a touch of humanity that can make a body laugh. In Crucible, from 1985, with its crazy creatures soaked and in colour and mirrored against the solid black of a puppeteer's stage, arms and legs are squirming, squiggly, life forms in some darkness, maybe space, maybe underwater, maybe in your dreams.
