Making their first appearance at the Lowry, the UK's best-known contemporary dance company offered a mixed bill that included a world premiere of 7DS. Choreographed by Didy Veldman (whose Carmen for the Northen Ballet Theatre toured earlier this year), 7DS - seven deadly sins - opens with a solitary female dancer standing in Edenic pastures, with the forbidden fruit balanced on her head. She is joined by four other women, each sporting a blackcurrant-coloured wig cut in a fashionable bob. Add vivid streetwise slacks and dresses, all glamorous practicality, and the dancers could be from the latest Gap advert; that trendy, clinically modern feel is emphasised by a stage bordered on three sides by tall blinds. These allow a disturbance of shadows, a play of disembodied hands, and moments of voyeurism as the dancers take turns to peep at the others cavorting through their sins.
To a soundtrack of electronic music, samples from Master of the Universe, giggles, sighs and belches, the women indulge themselves in pleasure; their fast, sharp movements give way to a langorously striding delight and then a violent, pacing anger of truncated gestures. There is much posture and play, and humour when they gorge themselves. When the sexual stakes are raised, skirts are hitched, tops lifted over heads, a finger is sucked - in innocence or licentiousness? The bare-backed titillation is followed by petulant strutting as the wickedness is finally released by a scream. Beautifully lit in mauve and green, the piece is visually arresting, yet it lacks sufficient narrative for the dancers to interpret despite the thematic content.
In a triple bill also featuring the mesmeric precision of Glen Tetley's Embrace Tiger and Return to Mountain, the success of the night was Christopher Bruce's modern classic, Ghost Dances. Inspired by Latin American rituals, the work centres on three male dancers, eerie in long black hair, skull-masks, painted ribs and tattered cloth suggestive of flayed flesh. To the accompaniment of a howling wind and folk music, they tumble and scamper and crawl, like human vultures. In one haunting moment, they link arms and soft-step to a jaunty string rhythm. Then, into the lair of death comes a troupe of civilised folk, their suits and dresses torn asunder during their time of wandering. As they engage in insouciant dances, skirts whirring, ties flapping, the deathly three walk among them and claim their carrion. This combination of gleeful folk dancing and grave stalking is an unnerving joy, and when the bodies fall limp the effect is otherworldly.
Ends tomorrow. Then touring to High Wycombe, Edinburgh, London and Plymouth.
