Silver Celebration was programmed to commemorate Dance Umbrella's. 25th anniversary. On paper, it looked like a party with the perfect guest list. On the night, though, the guests either turned up in the wrong mood or the wrong outfit: the evening just didn't gel.
Most of the featured artists were Umbrella old-timers. Sara Rudner, who danced in the opening festival, retains her aura of wayward serenity. In HeartBeat she revives the 1983 experiment in which her body is wired to a monitor that amplifies her heartbeat as she moves. It's an idea rich in potential drama - the heart hammering as the dancer pushes herself, pulsing as she rests. Yet the doodling moves to which Rudner confines herself underuse the technology, barely raising her heartbeat above a steady thud.
The secrets of the heart are far more interestingly revealed in David Gordon and Valda Setterfield's Duet from Private Lives of Dancers. Accompanied by the recorded conversations of famous couples, these long-time partners dance a wryly cautious duet while pursuing the long running dialogue of their own marriage. Domestic fusses, irritations and tenderness flow through a piece that celebrates without fuss or congratulation the rhythms of a lifetime's intimacy.
It is an odd wrench to go from Duet to Siobhan Davies's work in progress, Bird Song, in which Henry Montes and Deborah Saxon perform solos inflected with the brittle, darting, angular movements of birds. The marvellous morphing of their changes from human to feral is a superb advert for the finished piece.
But we barely have time to blink before the stage is taken over by Richard Alston's Roughcut (1990). This grandly looping setting of Steve Reich's music is fabulously executed - yet within the context of the event its pure, dancerly logic looks bland. Disappointing, too, is the presentation of Akram Khan's choreography. If Not Why Not is a dance film, and director Daniel Wiroth falls prey to all the temptations of the genre. Amid the editing tricks and close-ups, the visceral charge of Khan's choreography is exhausted. This is less a celebration than a dilution.
