Roger Van Der Poel and Celia Amade in NDT2's Sleight Of Hand. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
There is a huge disparity in the information that dance companies choose to supply in their programmes. At the Royal Ballet, audiences can always expect a small book filled with archive information, photos, biography, musical analysis, storylines and historical background. At the other extreme, the information provided by NDT2 for their current UK tour is almost zero. An oblique note about music is offered for Kylian's Sleepless, but audiences are left clueless about the surreal fantasy at work in Lightfoot and Leon's Sleight of Hand; or about the different choreographic strands of Ohad Naharin's Spit.
In some respects these differences are driven by price - the exemplary information provided by the Royal costs £5. But it's not all economics. Fleur Darkin, for instance, provides two sides of A4 text free of charge to audiences for her latest work Augustine, giving a passionately detailed account of the issues and inspiration that led to her to create it.
Much more significant are differences in company policy and audience expectation. Some choreographers take the "never apologise, never explain" line, and take it brilliantly. Merce Cunningham has never yielded to pressure to analyse his work, and for his fans, the magical open-endedness of his choreography is essential to its greatness. But Cunningham is celebrating the freedom of dance to do without plots, characters, symbols or themes. Other choreographers come with much more baggage, and audiences can need help. Kenneth MacMillan's ballet Mayerling has a tortuously complicated cast of characters and back history, which requires two pages of synopsis. And it's revealing how hard Rambert found it selling their revival of the Andrée Howard/David Garnett classic Lady Into Fox, because the company had been prevented by the Garnett Estate lawyers from printing an outline of the ballet's plot.
There is usually a huge amount to absorb on a dance stage - music, design, choreography and performance all flashing by at speed. And when audiences are struggling to piece together characters and events, it's self-evident that they are less able to appreciate the full impact of the work, even when there isn't an obvious plot but some sort of symbolic scenario - as with the Leon-Lightfoot work for NDT2. Is it too literal-minded for viewers to expect a few phrases, a few pointers that help them engage with the choreographer's thought process?
The suspicion may be that there aren't any worth engaging with.
