Yolande Snaith's latest work, Jardin Blanc, is inspired by gardens - wild gardens, formal gardens, herb gardens, secret gardens of the imagination. And the visual triumph of the piece is that for an hour, Snaith causes the stage to blossom in a fantastical evocation of flowers, shrubs, sunshine and shadow.
As always with Snaith's work, design is key and she has a superb collaborator in Sharon Marston. An artist who works with light, sculpture and fabric, Marston sets the elegant, futuristic tone of the work with a huge white column, festooned with fibre-optic ivy that glows and sparks on the stage like a space-age tree. Another shrubby structure blazing with light serves as a lily pond, a love seat and a flower bed; while a floating Chinese lantern works as both sun and moon.
Jean-Jacques Palix's score provides a soundtrack of buzzing insects and gentle drums while referencing famous examples of musical pastoral from Jerusalem to An English Country Garden. Snatches of children's songs and a woman's voice describing a lost Eden add the texture of memory and dream.
Given the rich imagery supplied by her team, Snaith has only to animate their input. Her five dancers rove the stage, pausing to coil into a lovers' embrace, or to languish in a noon-day stupor. Sly literary and painterly references are also slipped into their body language as they pose like aristocrats in a croquet match or rest like prettified peasants on their gardening tools.
But for the work to fulfil its considerable potential, it requires Snaith to develop her own dance fantasy and this rarely surfaces. The bland, generic moves don't create the rhythms of the landscape, nor do they give physical depth and personality to the people inhabiting it. Jardin Blanc is packed with beautiful, mysterious images - it's such a shame that Snaith's choreography does little more than stick them together.
