Many choreographers have used chance in an attempt to make their work unpredictable and break down the hierarchies involved in composition. Spanish choreographer La Ribot, with her team of 11, plays a game based on British sign language, dance codes, and the way choreographers find to communicate with their dancers. Dance language and its composition become more relevant when they relate to how humans communicate non-verbally. What La Ribot is interested in is the relation between a movement and the idea from which it originated.
In El Gran Game, the dancers use their bodies like pieces in a board game, referencing them with movement, gesture, costume and signs. While there is no speach, the dancers codify words into dance as they go through the game, drawing on a pool of basic material: three short texts, dressing and undressing and Bournonville's ballet La Sylphide.
Three main dancers throw the dice each time, while extras sit round the edge of the games board, concentrating like an audience at Wimbledon, before they either join in or perform their own tasks. La Ribot herself looks on like a proud mother at sports day. The joy of this scenario is that you don't know what is going to happen next. An intimate, cheeky conversation of signing between a dancer and the audience, an extraordinary stilted, stepping sequence that is inspired by a pair of smart high heeled shoes, or the sudden inclusion of an absurd and seemingly unrelated duet, give the performance a flavour of a surreal Spanish movie. A token ballet dancer, taking us by surprise, crosses from the diagonal and performs a delicate enchainment of softly shaped arms and precisely executed leg extensions and pirouettes. The style of La Sylphide, one of the earliest coded dances, is juxtaposed with the no-nonsense pedestrian movement-style of the other dancers.
While such a formulaic way of structuring a performance could make for a dry and impersonal event, the performers have a relaxed presence, laughing as they play, and slip into welcomed moments of chaos in their half-dressed appearance, (knickers and polo necks), through momentary bouts of confusion, or wrestling with their various accessories.
The two most accessible sections are centred around clothes, and both are driven by the warm beats of Salsa music, an unlikely sound for a prosaic game. The dancers repeatedly turn pairs of trousers inside out and in their urgency resemble pushy shoppers at the January sales. In the second section, they put on and remove a bizarre selection of garments, while giving each other timed instructions, as if taking part in a refereed striptease competition. This could be a scene from an Almodovar film in which hectic sexual encounters occur at high speed. Here, however, the act of getting naked is reduced to the purely functional.
For those who like deciphering rules and codes, El Gran Game is a must, particularly on the lofty setting of the QEH roof, where river breezes soothe the most scrambled of brains. Noises of the city may challenge the spectator's concentration, but do help transform the performance into a more generous urban experience, rather than an exclusive theatrical one.
