Nina Rajarani's Quick! - an all-male quartet that reinvented traditional Indian dance as a hectic snapshot of modern London - was a deservedly popular winner of last year's Place prize. With its four dancers dressed in business suits, the piece wittily used the scintillating pace of bharatanatyam to channel a hectic, competitive energy.
The same quartet from Rajarani's Srishti company, with a film backdrop of busy streets and skyscrapers, now forms the core of Rajarani's full-length Quiet, Please! This time, the material is one chapter in the story of Abhishek, a young Asian man who is on a mission to conquer corporate London, and save enough money to return to India and claim his childhood sweetheart, Nina.
Dancer Ash Mukherjee more than justifies his extended role. He is a sinewy jangle of energy and nerves, his dancing stretched by extreme angles and speed. He glitters in the pure bharatanatyam sequences, he is a manic operator in his city suit, and a fierce flame of anger when he returns to India to discover that his fiancee has fallen in love with another man.
Rajarani, as Nina, fails to match his gifts, however. She starts out promisingly in the opening dream duet, but in the second half, where Rajarani takes centre stage, dancing a classical solo to the serenading of her new lover, the entire piece takes a disappointing dive. Rajarani's fluttering glances, tremulous smiles and unexpectedly low-key technique feel like the stuff of feeble Bollywood cliche. Though the emotional and physical pace picks up when Abhishek arrives to confront her, it is not enough to stop Quiet! Please feeling like an evening of two irreparably disparate halves.
· At Taliesin Arts Centre, Swansea, Friday. Box office: 01792 602060. Then touring
