When Jeremy James died last year, aged 38, he had already brought to maturity a long and impressive career in dance. He had performed with some of Britain's most interesting companies, and the hallmarks of his style were familiar to a wide audience. Even though his dancing was underpinned by a strong classical discipline, it was animated by a dark, sardonic energy that made him compelling to watch.
James's personality always kept us satisfyingly on edge. He seemed to be engaged in some very private argument with the choreography so that we never knew when his brooding intelligence would turn violently active or break into anarchic gusts of humour.
As a choreographer, though, he had just begun to hit his stride, having fulfilled a handful of commissions and only recently formed his own small company. So when the Queen Elizabeth Hall hosted a retrospective evening of his work, it was not only to pay formal farewell to James, it was to let us assess what we had lost with his death.
The dancers certainly gave his work the performance of its life. I had always found something sullen and clogged in Gaps Lapse and Relapse, which James made for Rambert Dance Company in 1998, but Wednesday's performance revealed not only how much better the piece looks on an informal stage but that, danced flat out, it contains more pent-up fury, frustration and joy than I had acknowledged.
James's style was as logical as clockwork. He loved to set cogs and wheels of dance in motion so that the choreography coiled and jiggered tightly from one body to the next. In a work such as Minty, this structural intricacy looks almost neurotic as the dancers twitch frustratedly within the confines of each other's orbit. In Gaps, a huge volume of inventively shaped energy is built up within compact modules, and there are extraordinary moments when the whole thing threatens to fly apart with the sprung violence of a clock exploding.
In Parts, James's intense structural world expands and contracts with more abstract calm. Tiny steps react against each other, like molecules viewed under a lens, then build into dance phrases that zigzag between dancers with magisterial force. In Cheese, James's control of his effects looks hazier, less theatrical; this was exaggerated by a live performance of the music that stole the stage from the dancers.
Even though Cheese shows James in grungier mode, it doesn't diminish the fact that, choreographically, he was the real thing. The ability to structure a bunch of disparate human dancers into moments of pure rhythm, pure emotion and pure form is harder than it looks. The ability to hold the chancey, physical passion of live performance in balance with intellectual logic is both the hardest challenge and the greatest miracle of dance. James could do all that.
