Six fresh young dancers look as if they’ve bought the whole H&M spring collection – silver jeggings, stonewash, millennial pink. Then there’s a masked, dark-robed gimp-samurai-shaman type, brandishing drumsticks and emitting sinister cackles. Whatever Pierre Rigal’s Scandale may have to commend it, this odd conjunction of worlds sits uneasily.
Rigal, a Frenchman, went from being a 400m runner to a performer of high-concept solos (such as Press, where he was trapped in a cell of ever-decreasing size) to masterminding groups of hip-hop dancers exploring street vernaculars within a contemporary dance frame. Scandale is being presented by hip-hop festival Breakin’ Convention, now breaking out of its annual weekend slot to stage work as part of Sadler’s Wells’s regular programme. Rightly so. Hip-hop dance left the ghetto long ago.
The theme, not entirely new, is how music creates and controls the impulse to move. Sounds from the stage, including the dancers’ breath and voices, are sampled live and turned into a rhythmic soundtrack by the spooky shaman, the musician Gwenaël Drapeau. The music of Drapeau’s puppetmaster, in turn, triggers the dancers to move, joltingly, as if jagged beats are trying to escape their bodies, or in motifs stuck on glitchy repeat.
Once you’ve got the idea, the real interest lies in the flavour of the individual dancers, four men, two women, each with their own attack and groove, giving us snatches of popping, freezes, downrock and more. There are juicy moments, where a loping dancer looks like Trebor’s Mr Soft doing krump, for example, or when, attached to wires, one dancer executes an unearthly glide on one toe, his other leg held aloft.
There is plenty of clever detail and fine control (even without the wires), but ultimately the dancers seem trapped in this quasi-mystical creation myth, even when they seize control of the beat. As the stage moves from stark white emptiness to a backdrop of crescendoing shrieks and blood-red lighting, Scandale threatens to erupt into an all-out battle, or perhaps the apocalypse, but fizzles instead.
• At Sadler’s Wells, London, until 6 September.
