Rambert have a long and proud tradition of performing with live music. And that tradition has rarely been on more impressive display than in Dark Arteries, where the curtain rises to show the Tredegar Town brass band massed on one side of the stage.
That image promises so much, not just in the impact of the 38 musicians seated on their steeply tiered podium, but in the set design that’s integrated around them: steel scaffolding, Perspex sheets and gusts of dry ice that powerfully evoke the coalmining communities whose stories form the background to the work.
Yet Dark Arteries, choreographed by Mark Baldwin to a new score by Gavin Higgins, is a confusing piece. It opens to a pre-industrial world, with quietly fractured melodies supporting lines of spare lyrical dance. Yet it’s hard to get a handle on this world’s identity, given that the women’s long full-skirted dresses look more like evening gowns than farm clothes. And even when they’re joined by men and a harder, workmanlike dynamic develops, that uncertainty remains.
Too often, Baldwin’s choreography is more overwhelmed than inspired by the dark, glittering sound palette of Higgins’s score. There’s a lack of assertive style, an inconclusiveness of intent that muddies the piece. It’s only in the long middle section evoking the miners’ embattled history that Dark Arteries realises its potential – and does so magnificently, in churning, seething ensembles of dance, shot through with heart-racingly combative virtuosity.
Alexander Whitley’s Frames is much clearer in its intentions: an abstract work whose choreography is shaped by the steel rods that the cast manipulate as they move. Initially the rods are simply spun and thrust by the dancers, as if they were hard, silvery extensions of their own limbs. But progressively they become construction materials, assembled into a variety of shapes and objects. It sounds like an Ikea nightmare, but Whitley handles it very smartly, setting up a fascinatingly inventive interplay between the steel structures and the patterns of the dancers bodies.
Clever though this work is, it undercuts itself badly in an overlong and fiddly finale. Whitley could learn so much from Lucinda Childs’s 1990 classic Four Elements, which completes the programme. Childs’s choreography may be minimalist and repetitive, but in collaboration with Jennifer Bartlett’s designs and Gavin Bryars’s score it is charged with tension, epiphany, climax. Pure dance with an instinct for theatre.
• At Sadler’s Wells, London, until 16 May; touring the UK in the autumn. Box office: 0844 412 4300
