In James Cousins’ bold reinvention of As You Like It, the choreographer has moved a long way beyond his source. Not a word of Shakespeare is spoken, there are no named characters beyond the titular heroine, and there’s no obvious reference to the Forest of Arden in the abstract tubular stage set. Instead, Cousins has distilled the play down to the central drama of Rosalind who, forced to dress herself protectively as a man, finds herself testing the nature of her femininity – its frailties, its strengths and its flaws.
There are just four dancers on stage, with three of them (including a man) taking on the role of Rosalind and the fourth representing Orlando, her lover. All four morph through several changes of gender as Cousins choreographs them in an adroit succession of doublings and couplings. During the course of the work a new language of sexual fluidity emerges, which is mirrored in the narrated poems of Sabrina Mahfouz, in the (drastic) stylistic shifts in Seymour Milton’s accompanying score, and in the dancers’ quasi-modern, quasi-Elizabethan costumes.
When we first see Rosalind (alone and with her double) her dancing is as feminised as her dress, delicate tendrils of movement with which she seems to cradle herself into a small private space. The duets she dances with Orlando are equally traditional. He is the controlling partner who manipulates and lifts her, and at moments this coupling degenerates into a brutal display of power, as he flips, throws and twists Rosalind around as though she were a doll.
However, as soon as she puts on a suit of male clothes, everything changes. The lines of her movement harden, her gaze becomes direct, and she acquires an entirely different range of gestures – brisk, functional and mechanical. Orlando, too, undergoes a parallel transformation. At first, when he dances with the suited Rosalind, whom he assumes to be a man, he’s joshing and comradely; it’s a rough and tumble between equals. But under her patient tutelage his vocabulary takes on different softness and attentiveness: his feminine side reaching out to her masculine.
Cousins is a talented, resourceful choreographer, his cast are superb, and all these different Rosalinds are vivid and alive to us. The duets are especially satisfying, ranging inventively from reckless flights of passion and conflict to beautifully observed intimacies of glance and touch. But, as accomplished as Cousins’ movement is, this work is too subtle for its own good.
There are moments when its structure and its accompanying poems do seem to make references back to Shakespeare, but these are fleeting. Because they tempt us to try to force links that aren’t really there, they distract from the power of the choreography on stage. Rosalind would probably have ended up a far stronger and more coherent piece if Cousins had let go of his original source entirely and fashioned an independent narrative of his own.
• At the Place, London, until 18 March. Box office: 020-7121 1100.
