Rambert Dance Company, Theatre Royal Brighton, March 23 to March 26 (From The Argus)

Rambert Dance Company, Theatre Royal Brighton, March 23 to March 26

10:19am Friday 25th March 2011 in Stage Reviews By Louise Schweitzer

When Isadora Duncan was asked what her dance was about, she replied that if she could tell you, she wouldn’t have to dance it. Contemporary dance, in a similar vein to modern art, atonal music and 20th century architecture, is an abstraction: a paring down to essentials to allow the imagination free rein and never better demonstrated than by the Rambert Dance Company in Brighton.

The programme features three short and contrasting dances. The Art Of Touch, or three men, four girls and a harpsichord, was inspired by plucked strings and set to Scarlatti. Choreographer Siobham Davies throws her barefoot dancers around the stage with the same glittering virtuosity as the keyboard sonatas, echoing baroque rhythms and harmonic patterns. Arrested movements are a tribute to the stopframe photography of Muybridge – imagination making them string-pulled puppets or strobe lighting.

Rainforest by contemporary doyen Merce Cunningham with designs by Andy Warhol and electronic music from David Tudor is slow-moving sculpture and strangely moving. Figures in androgynous nude, torn bodysuits weave and twist like primeval plants and animals, illustrating why Cunningham has become a name for dance based on the architecture of the human body.

Awakenings is based on a true story of paralysed patients who are mysteriously revived. Reanimation is a familiar theme in ballet from The Sleeping Beauty onwards, offering marvellous opportunities for expansion from contraction, from passive to active and, in Awakenings, from death to life. Tobias Picker’s 12 “frozen” opening chords recall Schopenhauer’s dictum of architecture as frozen music, a useful analogy in considering them as polyphonic building blocks in a score which inextricably underpins the drama of the dance. As with The Art Of Touch, Awakenings uses a bare stage, scant costumes and no props – the magical dancers convey all that is required with every fibre of their elastic, expressive and inexhaustible beings.