Any small dance company growing up in St Petersburg must want to kick hard against the monolithic influence of the Kirov Ballet, which has dominated that city's dance culture for over 200 years - and Sasha Pepelyaev's Kinetic Theatre certainly do a lot of kicking. In the double bill that they've been presenting in London this week (their second visit since they formed in 1994), the group's five dancers frequently behave like truculent toddlers - lying on the floor and screaming, refusing stubbornly to move and disrupting phrases of grown-up dance with furiously ungracious moves.
This mix of serious and subversive, athletic and absurd is obviously part of Pepelyaev's quest to invent new choreographic strategies within the predominantly classical Russian scene. So while his company members are all, visibly, ballet-trained, their vocabulary features traces of American post-modernism and expressionist new European dance. It also plays with a style of surreal clowning familiar to UK audiences from Slava's Snow Show (Slava was, in fact, in the audience on opening night).
In the first piece, Not There, the clowning is mostly embodied in the surly, trampish figure of Pepelyaev himself, who either rants commands at the four other dancers, or rumbles a hoarse running commentary to his own slapstick moves. The dancers respond in bursts of compliantly graceful choreography or in fits of obsessive housework - wiping the chairs lined up in a corner of the stage. Sometimes they resist altogether, smooth, gentle faces distorted by howls and whimpers.
While this alternation between anarchy and precision sparks some pleasing discordances (I liked the painted backdrop of an audience whose cardboard hands break into clockwork applause like a flock of birds), there is no focus to its lunacy. Pepelyaev gives us no clues about the fantasy world he thinks his dancers are inhabiting.
However, the score's musical collage of Italian opera, Latin dance music and Spanish smooch cues steps that deftly parody those genres. These we understand, and the performers prove as likable as comedians as they are as dancers. But overall, the evening leaves us with the sense of a company so locked into their private jokes and preoccupations that they have stopped noticing whether anyone else is listening.
