Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet: “Mixed Rep” and Orbo Novo -
Adelaide Festival of Arts, Adelaide Festival Theatre, 6 and 7 March -
This year’s Adelaide Festival dance program is very slim indeed, with only one company on offer. David Sefton’s directorship has seen a tailing off in the dance offerings - from a laudatory seven in 2013, to three last year and a disappointing one in 2015. This is a worrying trend, and one that will hopefully be reversed next year. Another, albeit lesser, aggravation is the lack of paper programs, with Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet’s programs only available online via the Festival app. Not having been forewarned of this, I scrambled to download it before the curtain went up on “Mixed Rep”, only to find that it contained minimal information, not even listing who was dancing in each piece.
New York based Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet is a repertory company founded in 2003 by the Wal-Mart heiress Nancy Walton Laurie, and the company commissions works by the world’s leading contemporary choreographers. Whilst the company’s fourteen dancers are master technicians and strongly individual, just occasionally their movement seemed generic and even a bit commercial, and for me this detracted from an otherwise strong offering. This was especially so in the Jiri Kylian piece, Indigo Rose, that opened “Mixed Rep”. Made for NDT’s youth company in 1998, this is a slight work (and far from being his best) that celebrates youth and the transient nature of relationships. A diagonal white cable, from which a white triangular silk later unfurls, sets the scene, and the male dancers are clad in shiny coloured pants and mesh tops, with the women in corsets and shorts. A series of solos, duets and ensemble sequences, both in front of and behind the silk—casting interesting and often frenetic shadows—explore various romantic and emotional entanglements. The movement is characteristically Kylian, all razor sharp precision with many fast jumps and multiple turns, and whilst nailed by the nine dancers technically, was let down stylistically by the occasional jazzy inflection. The ending, a video of faces being pulled out of shape, is anticlimactic and feels like filler.
Crystal Pite’s Ten Duets on a Theme of Rescue was made on the company, and I felt they inhabited her choreography more convincingly. It’s a sombre, intense piece made up of a series of overlapping duets exploring the idea of rescue. Lighting plays an important part, with the nine dancers manipulating a set of moveable standing lamps, creating a hazy, shadowy atmosphere. The movement is often quite slow, building tension as dancers seek to be rescued from themselves or each other. The final duet, in which a man desperately clings to the hand of a woman who abandons him, was very poignant.
The final work is Violet Kid by Hofesh Shechter, the Israeli choreographer and composer, and it’s a frenetic ensemble piece, incorporating many folkloric, even tribal, motifs, such as group huddles, low travelling hops, clapping and circle dancing. Shechter’s pounding score drives the work, which is relentlessly energetic, rather too long and repetitive, but danced compellingly and given a standing ovation at the end.
The second program consisted of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Orbo Novo, inspired by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor’s account of having a stroke. The set, a series of lattice screens that are manipulated to make enclosures and cage-like structures, begins as a boundary, with a woman on one side and a man on the other, touching each other yearningly through the bars. The dancers then speak Bolte Taylor’s account of her stroke. Although overlong, this is cleverly handled through the use of unison, canon and mime, and introduces the idea of the two hemispheres of the brain representing different aspects of experience, and also of the stroke itself as an ambiguous experience: confusing and painful but also mind expanding, even euphoric. The following dance sequences play with images of the bodily damage inflicted by the stroke, such as an ensemble piece in which everyone has a paralyzed arm, and a beautifully danced duet in which man and woman are afflicted with a terrible palsy, only alleviated when they join hands. Another sequence in which two men are joined at the head seems to symbolize the two hemispheres of the brain. Szymon Brzoska’s emotive score, recorded by the Mosaic String Quartet, adds considerably to the poignancy of the work, which is danced with conviction by the entire company.
In sum, although for me they didn’t quite match the hype, this is a terrific ensemble of dancers presenting work that is definitely worth seeing.
- Maggie Tonkin