thu 28/03/2024

Hush/ Awakenings/ Cardoon Club, Rambert Dance, Sadler's Wells | reviews, news & interviews

Hush/ Awakenings/ Cardoon Club, Rambert Dance, Sadler's Wells

Hush/ Awakenings/ Cardoon Club, Rambert Dance, Sadler's Wells

A new Christopher Bruce masterpiece: Rambert strikes it right again

“Nice is different from good,” sings one of Stephen Sondheim’s characters. And mostly, it is different, “nice” rarely being “good”. Christopher Bruce, however, blows that theory right out of the water, because Hush, his 2006 piece which opens Rambert’s Sadler’s Wells season, is both good and nice. And that’s much more remarkable than it seems: attempting to find the beauty, the depth and the radiance of “good” has caused many great artists to stumble. That Bruce achieves his goals with such serenity and power seems little short of miraculous.

Hush is built around a series of numbers composed by Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma, ranging from bits of the classical repertoire, skittery takes of bebop, bluegrass, folk, and almost everything else you can think of. Yet instead of being stuffed so full of everything that it means nothing, the music provides a strong scaffolding for a meditation on youth, on age, and on how one gets from one to the other and back again. And against this scaffolding, Bruce creates a limpid non-narrative that echoes and deepens the music: a couple, their four children, enter, dance, the children go to sleep; the parents dance, the children wake, or perhaps dream, or perhaps both; all dance; the end. Except that that summary leaves out everything that makes this a piece of magic. It leaves out the gentle whimsy that is charming rather than cloying, with a gentleness that is dignified, gracious – all of the words, and values, that contemporary theatre overlooks in its ever more desperate quest for angst and excitement. Bruce is clever enough to find the excitement in quietness, in grace; and he is a talented enough choreographer – thrillingly talented enough – to be able to translate that quiet and grace into movement.

HushI have spent so many evenings watching beautifully designed, beautifully lit productions, and I frequently find myself thinking, there, and there: those are where the photographs are going to be taken. With Bruce – while the set and lighting are terrific, all black and white and yellow, glistening and glinting – it is the choreography, the emotional life of the characters as shown in everyday gestures laced through highly stylised movement, the skittering, sliding, glancingly sly steps, that kept me engaged.

All six dancers inhabit the steps as though they were built on them (they weren’t), but Angela Towler, as the mother (pictured above, with Jonathan Goddard), with her Tilda Swinton-like colouring and touching emotional range, stood out, as did Thomasin Gülgeç as the younger brother. And with all their skill the show was still deftly stolen from under their noses by a deadpan, seethingly brilliant Estela Merlos. Despite these fine individual performances, though, it is the image of the united family walking into their happy life together that remains.

AwakeningsAwakenings
(pictured, with Malgorzata Dzierzon) is yet another spin-off from Dr Oliver Sacks’s endless bag of tricks: there have been two films (don’t bother), a documentary, Pinter’s take on it, A Kind of Alaska (definitely do bother), now a ballet – all that’s left, I imagine, is, Awakenings: the Fizzy Drink! And yet, cynicism aside, Awakenings the ballet, choreographed by Aletta Collins to music by Tobias Picker, is really very, very good indeed. For me, the problem with Oliver Sacks’s book is the dense, clotted prose: Sacks has never met a metaphor he didn’t love; and then want to breed, to create more baby metaphors (I think it must be contagious). There are digressions, footnotes, asides, digressions to the footnotes, asides to the digressions. Well, you get my drift. And here, in Collins’s rather austere, rather beautiful piece, all of Sacks’s cleverness has been pushed to one side, and what we are left with, beautifully left with, is the haunting story.

In the 1920s, a worldwide epidemic of a mystery illness, encephalitis lethargica, killed thousands, and left thousands more in a bizarre “petrified” condition, frozen. The only thing they responded to was music, which seemed to help them move, for as long as it played. Forty years after the original illness struck, a new drug enabled them, for the first time in four decades, to move and, ultimately, find some sort of equilibrium between frenetic movement and freezing. The story is, of course, vastly more complicated, but Collins has, with the help of Picker’s energetic, disciplined but discursive score, managed to go to the heart of the matter: movement and its meaning. The choreography for the entire group is particularly fine, especially with Miriam Buether’s stark set, and Yaron Abulafia’s gorgeous daffodil-coloured light. Ultimately the only problem is, as this is a story of real people, there is no satisfying artistic resolution; life doesn’t work like that, which is why so many of us prefer art.

Cardoon_2The finale, Henrietta Horn’s Cardoon Club (main picture above, and right), could have done with rather more art. This piece is, in theory at least, one of Rambert’s romp-ish, fun-filled finales. Only one catch: it isn’t any fun. It is, in fact, strange that it is so un-fun, since all the ingredients are there: it takes place in a mysterious nightclub, filled with glamorous men and women stalking the dancefloor. I think the problem is they aren’t stalking each other, and instead everyone is pretty well locked in their own sealed world. The most successful section is where the lighting (excellently conceived by Reinhard Hubert) backlights all the dancers, who pulse slowly across the stage in black silhouette against a red backdrop. Now the fact that they have no interior life is matched by their lack of exterior: they are voids, and suddenly the piece coheres. But then the lights go up, and the piece goes on. And on. And then on again. A dying fall to an otherwise thrilling evening.

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