Someone asked me the other day what historical dance work I would like to have seen. I plumped for the first night, in 1946, of Symphonic Variations, the work with which Frederick Ashton defined British ballet. My friend chose the riot-scarred premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913), which is probably a better choice. But I’d also love to have seen Isadora Duncan dance.
The problem with Duncan, who was born in 1877 and died at the age of 50, is that dance-lovers – and feminists – know she was important. She threw out corsets, shoes and pretty steps to plug herself into the elemental soul of dance, making it express profound emotion and fierce freedom. When a teenage Ashton saw her, he was entranced; his Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan (1976) is included in this programme by the Viviana Durante Company. So is Dance of the Furies, to Gluck, recreated by Barbara Kane and Durante from steps supposedly choreographed by Duncan herself.
Both short pieces are problematic; it’s as if we are looking the wrong way through the telescope of history, and instead of coming into close-up, Duncan’s significance seems diminished. The Ashton is lovely, played beautifully by pianist Anna Geniushene, and it is danced with a pensive grace by Begoña Cao (stepping in at short notice for an injured Durante), but its peach-costumed poses, elegant skips and dramatic runs only give us glimpses of the force of nature that the dancer supposedly was.
Dance of the Furies, on the other hand, reported in its day (1911) to be ugly in its depiction of women red in tooth and claw, now looks positively quaint as the five women batter their fists against the sky and run with their hands behind their backs. There are some insights, but it feels tame.
Durante and her collaborators have done their best to catch the mood Duncan supposedly conjured. The design team have created a mistily lit space that evokes Greek temples; there is fire; there are draped costumes. But it is in the final piece, Unda, a new work choreographed by Joy Alpuerto Ritter for six female dancers, that the most interesting glimpse of Duncan emerges.
Ritter has looked at history and incorporates elements of Duncan’s tragic life. There’s a sequence where a backlit figure seems to be in agony, as if mourning a family group seen in the foreground; water, important to Duncan, falls into ceramic bowls. What’s impressive, though, is Ritter’s forging of her own style of movement, creating sensual, swaying patterns where each woman is both part of a community and a distinctive individual, reacting with fluid and unexpected shapes to the promptings of a score composed and played live (with electronic interventions) by the cellist Lih Qun Wong. I rather loved it.
Lin Hwai-min, founder of Cloud Gate, has in his own thoughtful way had as radical an effect on dance in his day as Duncan did in hers, bringing contemporary dance to Taiwan and creating a hugely influential company. He has also planned for his retirement, handing over the reins to Cheng Tsung-lung, a choreographer who has a different style but who draws just as deeply on the exceptional talents of the Cloud Gate dancers. Both men’s work come together on this double bill.
In 13 Tongues, Cheng is inspired by Taiwanese folklore in a phantasmagorical creation of a marketplace, where dancers move in shifting groups, the movement seeming to ripple through every cell of their body, around those declaiming tales in loud shouts and sharp, fractured solos. The mood moves from dark to light with bright projections, luminous clothes and a koi carp swimming across the back of the stage. Cheng seems to have almost too many ideas: flickers of gorgeous choreography – women swinging their arms in low loops, little jumps and jabs, slides on the spot where bodies look like molten lead – pass before the eye and then are gone. It’s mesmeric but overlong.
Lin Hwai-min, on the other hand, understands that less is sometimes more. Dust, created in 2014, but receiving its British premiere, is a masterpiece set to a recording of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No 8 in C minor. That was composed in response to the horror of the bombing of Dresden; the choreographer turns its piercing sadness into a requiem for human suffering, sending his company – dust covered, their garments torn and stained – staggering across the stage in steps of heavy misery.
His effects are simple – a shuddering man, a couple dragging each another slowly through space, groups frozen in agonised poses, desperately tugging, falling, running. But they are applied with enormous sophistication, constantly sensitive to the Shostakovich. Its most staggering moment comes when the dancers fall back on to the stage and lie still, a group of figures like so many bodies in so many mass graves. Slowly, individuals emerge, caught in infinite sorrow. The entire piece is animated by a rare sincerity. It’s devastating.
Star ratings (out of five)
Isadora Now ★★★
13 Tongues and Dust ★★★★
