Any choreographer who compiles a playlist of Burt Bacharach's greatest hits as a soundtrack to their childhood memories has an easy claim on their audience's sympathy. If over half the theatre is silently crooning along to Say a Little Prayer or Walk on By, then no one's going to be overly critical of what's being danced on stage. But Doug Elkins's The Look of Love still feels like an odd production. His own account of the piece is that it stems from memories of watching his parents' friends dancing and flirting to Bacharach's songs. It is about his infant understanding of the sexual and social rituals played out on the dance floor as couples stake out their claims to each other, tease, retreat, and maybe get lucky. Yet what's actually happening in the choreography seems to get stuck at the level of dancers just having fun with the music.
Elkins's company of six are a completely likable troupe - adroit technicians with a casually athletic style that allows them to bop with unselfconscious enthusiasm around a public stage. His choreography is also completely likable. His trademark mix of styles - club, martial arts and mainstream modern dance - has developed into a supple and fluent language that seems to loop effortlessly around whatever music is playing.
At times his style is charged with classy wit. In the What's New Pussycat number, Elkins pokes delicious fun at the clockwork waltz time of Bacharach's beat, while his mix of flamenco footwork and kittenish mime flits between levels of kitsch and sexiness that are perfectly of the period. There are individual steps within all of the dances that are equally arresting - bold, clever lifts that you can't see coming, deft variations on disco that make you want to get up and dance.
But other than some light-hearted lovemaking between moves, no action develops as one number segues cheerfully into the next. Apart from the occasional interpolation of Elkins's own teenage music (songs by Daniel Johnston), there is no distancing device that could allow us to view the dancers' activity as if through the eyes of a child.
Nor is there much evidence of the grand passions that are the subject of the songs. The huge heart-wrenching changes of key that made Bacharach into the pop diva's composer of choice, the swooping flights from full-throated agony to whispering plea, find no equivalent in Elkins's choreography. This work is not about people falling in love, or about discovering love vicariously. It's about dancing to records.
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