Rambert Dance Company
Tread Softly / Carnival of the Animals / The Comedy of Change
Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London
3 November 2009
The Rambert Dance Company is a British institution that goes a long way back, built today on the fundamentals of seemingly many Anglo-Saxon companies – abstraction, musicality, and a healthy dose of classical technique. You could find worse combinations, and their Comedy of Change tour brought some thought-provoking choreography to Sadler’s Wells, despite the odd flaws.
Tread Softly, a creation by Henri Oguike, opened the evening, and there was nothing remotely soft about its treading. The piece starts with a man standing on a woman, who wakes up and stares at the audience (well, who wouldn’t be surprised). The title is taken from the last line of He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, by Yeats – Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. The choreography certainly sees much sexual innuendo in these words, as there is a lot of simulation going on in the first part of the piece. Things improve in the second half, which makes better use of the ensemble, but the plodding nature of much of the choreography doesn’t do justice to Schubert’s Death and The Maiden.
The Carnival of the Animals, on the other hand, is an absolute delight to watch. A revival of Siobhan Davies’s 1982 choreography, it brings humour and wit to a well-balanced evening. A woman in a tail coat directs this strange zoo, opening the curtain in the back on a jungle painting, and giving directions to the orchestra. Under her supervision, a flock of dancers jumps on stage, dressed in witty white suits, enacting Saint-Saëns’s défilé of animals. The choreography is intimately musical, both simple and full of jokes, and it hardly matters what animals are represented exactly – what comes across is their distinctive qualities, their most touching aspects. The cuckoo becomes a dancer with only one clock-like movement of the arm, desperately following around a sophisticated woman, not unlike a sad clown. The director (Pieter Symonds) becomes the elephant in a series of sweeping, powerful, almost faun-like images. The group passages at the end feature stunning musical patterns, although the Swan is a slight disappointment – beautifully choreographed for a man but lacking in stillness and sense of destiny on the first night. The dancers freeze in a painting watched by their leader at the end of the carnival – a zoo of personalities shining through, as it should in many more dance pieces.
Mark Baldwin, the director of the company, saved his own take on the current science craze for last. It seems as if every company is doing a science-inspired creation these days – certainly Wayne McGregor seems to have set the trend with his choreography, often heavy on technology. Rambert contributes a Comedy of Change that makes numerous references to Darwin and the notion of evolution. Huge, half-transparent chrysalises lay on stage, from which the dancers slowly break free. Dressed in black and white unitards, they enact the development of species through ever-changing groups. Movement and lighting have their moments, though the music by Julian Anderson makes it hard to find real unity in this comedy. An unflattering change of costumes (to odd head-covering unitards) doesn’t help, in spite of some very interesting images, most notably the Pompeii-like aluminium cast of a kneeling dancer that remains centre stage like an abandoned cocoon – until some dancers, at the very end, crush it to the floor. This simple metaphorical violence probably said more about evolution than most “scientific” choreography ever will.
