Next year, as Phoenix celebrates its 35th anniversary, the Leeds-based company can pride itself on being one of Britain’s most enduring dance institutions. It may have suffered through numerous changes of direction, but it’s never lost sight of its underlying brand – mixing the popular mainstream with the unexpected and unpredictable.
It’s kudos, certainly, to current director Sharon Watson for making Phoenix the first British company to pick up on Caroline Finn, recent winner of the New Adventures choreographer award. Finn’s 30-minute Bloom is a mordantly dark and funny fantasy that’s partly reminiscent of the deviant imaginings of Lea Anderson but also unlike anything I’ve seen.
Structured as a cabaret of oddities (with shades of Weimar Berlin), it’s presided over by a mute MC, whose face is concealed behind a grotesquely melancholic mask. He circles his microphone – all anxious angles – as if unable to nerve himself to perform; and he’s completely ignored by his fellow artists who are grouped around a table, mewling and chattering incomprehensibly.
When these others take the spotlight, it’s to equally dysfunctional effect.
There’s a big duet in which Prentice Whitlow’s dimly narcissistic danseur comes close to missing his partner every time she pitches herself at him; and a creepily beguiling solo danced by Carmen Vazquez Marfil to the lethally witty ditty, Miss Lucy Had Some Leeches. As Emilie Autumn’s lyrics itemise the barbaric tortures inflicted on women by male doctors, there’s a brilliant slippage between Marfil’s daffily compliant smile and the anguished protests of her body.
The rest of the programme treads more familiar ground. Itzik Gallili’s Until.With/Out.Enough is a powerful response to its Górecki score, with a fierce pendulum rhythm driving full-bodied loops and chugs of dance. But Galili doesn’t convince us of his stated theme – exploring the mind’s interior spaces. The slower suspended sections lose momentum, and the non-dance motifs – little spasms of silent gabbling, a dancer tiptoeing across the stage with a balloon in her hand – feel like add-on devices.
There are more balloons in Sharon Watson’s TearFall, which is inspired by the complex chemistry of human tears. With teardrop lights complementing pearl-coloured balloons, and with the nine dancers weaving their own molecular chains, it is often lovely to look at. Yet, like Galili’s piece, TearFall suffers a lack of focus – we see riffs on an idea, but not the idea itself.
• At the Linbury studio, London, until 14 November. Box office: 020-7304 4000
