Carefully placed on the stage of Salia ni Seydou's new work, Taagala: Le Voyageur, are two surreal wooden figures. One is a round mask of a head jammed between two short legs, the other a bent man or woman, seated on top of a huge cubist face. The sense of stubbornly kept secrets contained within these disjointed bodies could not flag up more vividly the impenetrable nature of the work itself.
Salia Sanou and Seydou Boro both grew up in Burkina Faso, west Africa, but for years have been based in France. Their joint style reflects their personal geography, and the virtuoso intensity they distil from their native African dance traditions - flickering rhythms of hips and shoulders, rippling spines, pumping knees - has deservedly been highly acclaimed. But the communal energy associated with traditional African dance is compressed into repetitive sequences, stilled into jaggedly expressive images, or galvanised into bruising confrontations. This is African dance crossed with minimalism, Eurocrash and butoh.
The connecting thread of Taagala is a journey. Jammed together in a seated shuffle, Salia, Seydou and the company's other two dancers seem to be navigating a stretch of water. They lie full-length on the floor, limbs trembling fiercely as if possessed by dangerous forces. Returning to dance the same moves over and over again, they seem to alternate between sudden joy and despair. At the end we guess there is some sort of closure, as a woman stands high on the shoulders of two men to make a final stately crossing to the front of the stage, draped in a cloak.
There is no denying the beauty and concentration of these dancers, who strike mysterious, resonant images with their bodies. But the logic of their shared voyage is impenetrable. Nothing in the musical accompaniment (percussion, African violin) urges the transition of one image to the next; nothing in the choreography or the dancers' demeanour suggests motive or progression. Nor is there a sense of universal ritual to carry the piece forward. Taagala provides some extraordinary choreographic scenery, but its refusal to share its inner itinerary with the audience makes it a frustrating piece of dance theatre.
