Rambert’s latest triple bill turns its gaze back to the 20th century. The 3 Dancers, choreographed by former company member Didy Veldman, takes as its inspiration Picasso’s 1925 painting of the same name, which shows a trio of elongated figures locked into an anguished danse macabre. It’s thought to have been the artist’s response to the death of his friend Ramon Pichot. Years earlier, Picasso, Pichot and a painter named Carlos Casagemas were all involved with the life model and femme fatale Germaine Gargallo. Tortured by unrequited love, Casagemas shot himself.
From this material, Veldman weaves a piece for six dancers that makes formal reference to passion and suicide, but whose primary concern is the act of seeing. The costumes, by Kimie Nakano, are black and white; Nakano’s set is a tilted black rectangle on a grey ground. At intervals, giant shards of glass descend, as if to emphasise the splintered, refracted nature of the choreography. The dancers form tense, linear groupings whose shifting vectors reflect emotional ebb and flow. This is a strongly balletic cast and Veldman makes impressive use of their neoclassical placement and long, probing limbs. The dancers’ exchanges, impelled as they are by a restless energy, are more engaging than Elena Kats-Chernin’s specially composed score, which has a tendency to decline into noodling, cocktail hour inconsequentiality.
What Veldman is attempting, with the aid of Nakano’s designs and the silvery wash of Ben Ormerod’s lighting, is a danced representation of cubism. There’s an implicit acknowledgement that photography has changed the visual game, and Veldman’s fractured montages suggest, at moments, a multiplicity of perspectives. But she isn’t able to manipulate our way of seeing to the degree that William Forsythe is, in ballets such as Artifact and Eidos: Telos. Forsythe’s choreography is truly cubist and, like Picasso’s painting, risks the grotesque. Veldman, for now, appears wedded to a less radical aesthetic.
Several choreographers have set work to Schoenberg’s late romantic sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), and this year it’s the turn of Kim Brandstrup. Schoenberg’s 1899 composition was inspired by a Richard Dehmel poem, in which a woman tells her lover that she is pregnant by another man. Brandstrup’s piece has a starkly expressionist quality, wholly sympathetic to the proto-modernist mood of the music. In the place of the pregnancy confession he takes the less specific idea of “a devastating disclosure” and offers three possible outcomes.
Each takes the form of a duet backed by a 16-strong, black-clad ensemble. In the first, Simone Damberg Würtz has just confided in Miguel Altunaga. His body language tells of his icy shock. He’s there and not there; he won’t meet her eye. Würtz, in her turn, is terrified by his ambivalence. She cleaves to him, desperate for reassurance, but he evades her. In the second duet, Dane Hurst and Hannah Rudd enact a touching if implausible scenario in which he lovingly forgives her, while the third section, again with Altunaga and Würtz, shows the pair distraught but able to negotiate a way forward together. This is a humane and eloquent piece, wonderfully danced. Hurst, in particular, is superb. This is his final week with the company that he joined in 2004 and his musicality and rocketing jump will be much missed by them.
The evening ends with Rooster, Christopher Bruce’s 1991 ballet set to songs by the Stones. It’s well danced, and I’m an admirer of Bruce’s choreography in general, but the piece is so convinced of its own wit, and so irritating in its mannerisms (the men’s endless, geezer-ish tie straightening, in particular) that it loses me every time. But that’s just me. The Rambert faithful loved it.
