A triumph of human spirit over darkness
Ghost Dances Triple Bill (Theatre Royal) Verdict: Powerful as ever ★★★★✩
HAVING begun almost as an experiment, it has become an institution. Formed as Ballet Rambert in 1926, it now celebrates its 90th birthday national tour as simply Rambert. Established as one of the finest contemporary dance companies in the world, the celebratory tour has been built around its greatest and most memorable creation – Christopher Bruce’s compellingly powerful and spellbinding Ghost Dances.
First staged in 1981, it is arguably the finest and most influential modern dance work created in Britain in the past half-century.
Inspired by the horrors of the Pinochet coup in Chile in 1973 and subsequent terrors of his dictatorship, it is a terrifically moving demonstration of the triumph of the human spirit over darkness.
One of the most affecting elements of Ghost Dances is the slow, stately progress of a column of The Disappeared – victims taken from their homes and families by the dreaded ‘knock on the door’ at dead of night and never seen alive, or often even dead, again. In the midst of their solemn progress, they break off to recreate poignant scenes from their previous life.
Overseeing the process are three Ghost Dancers from the horrors of the deepest recesses of the Day of the Dead darkness of the South American psyche. As these hideous apparitions, Daniel Davidson, Liam Francis and Juan Gil were equally stunning and terrifying.
Bruce allows them to choreograph life into death and despair – yet somehow the quiet dignity of the dispossessed cannot be defeated. Although Ghost Dances is the centrepiece of this anniversary tour, it is forming a series of triple bills with a changing selection of some of the more recent additions to the Rambert repertoire.
Over the past week, it has been complemented, both at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal and Eden Court in Inverness, by Tomorrow and Transfigured Night.
Tomorrow, choreographed by Lucy Guerin, is taken from Macbeth. Not that it is a faithfully recreated, danced version of Shakespeare. It is, I think, more inspired by than based upon the Scottish Play.
In a very literal sense, it is a double-take on the tale. The stage is divided into two squares; one black, one white. In some sense it is a chess board, albeit the simplest possible one of two contrasting squares. The white square’s dancers are all in black; the black’s dancers all in white.
The action is split in the dance, with one square containing the ‘real’ characters from Macbeth and the other the supernatural ones, principally the witches. It is a powerful piece – though I could not help but wonder if it would really have changed many perceptions if the audience had or had not realised the Shakespearean inspiration… and would it have mattered?
Transfigured Night was a visual delight, created by Kim Brandstrup to the music of Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht.
Taken from a narrative poem of the same name by Richard Dehmel, it is based on a woman’s confession to her lover that she is pregnant by another man.
The piece is a symbolic exposition of darkness and light as it explores a range of possible outcomes to the dilemma.
In the background, an ensemble of dark-clad dancers frames two light-drenched couples, presumably representing ‘the two halfs of a threesome’.
Miguel Altunaga and Simone Damberg Würtz provided a bright, striking tour de force as the ‘first couple’. But Liam Francis and Hannah Rudd (late of the Scottish Ballet parish) eclipsed them as the ‘other half’ of what might have been.
Both couples produced rather magnificent performances, complemented by the shadowy figures of humanity behind.
This was a strong triple bill. Ghost Dances is probably the finest Rambert has but it was not let down by its companions. I’m already looking forward to the centenary celebrations.