A stunning performance of sleekness and stillness
WHAT a shame that the best contemporary dance company in Britain, created by the f i nest dancer Scotland has ever produced, goes literally out of its way to bring outstanding cutting-edge choreography to an ambitious provincial theatre – and the house is half full.
No, let’s be honest. The house is half empty.
Sadly, if the paying public can’t be bothered to turn up for work of this quality, how can they ever expect topclass companies to tour outside Edinburgh and Glasgow again?
For make no mistake, if this production had been playing at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal or in the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, it would have been a sell-out, with tickets like gold dust.
A pity, then, that a theatre which secured a substantial coup for the Forth Valley area suffered such a disappointment. Creative Scotland must sometimes wonder why it bothers.
The Michael Clark Company didn’t have to undertake a short tour of Scotland – visiting Stirling, Inverness and its founder’s home town of Aberdeen – before heading off to prestigious summer festivals in Berlin, Hamburg and Helsinki, and then a US tour stretching the length of fabled Route 66, from Chicago to LA.
But they did. And Harry Alexander, Julie Cunningham, Melissa Hetherington, Oxana Panchenko, Daniel Squire and Benjamin Warbis deserved a better response from ticket-buyers than they got on a glorious summer evening at Stirling University’s beautiful campus theatre.
It’s a small group of dancers, but a superbly fit and tightly disciplined one. Individually and – this is important – collectively, they shone. Their sharpness of technique, allied to a purity of line, produced as good a performance as the ‘Macbob’ will see this year – or most others.
These qualities lay at the heart of Michael Clark’s own genius. And let us be under no illusions, a genius he was.
Those of us who saw him back in the day, when he voluntarily and controversially relinquished his anointed role as the golden boy of the Royal Ballet to set up the eponymous company that made the avant garde appear stale and pedestrian, will never forget his wondrous combination of soaring artistry, barely believ- able levels of fitness and rocksolid classical technique.
The last, of course, is key to the conundrum. You cannot – simply cannot – be a first-rate contemporary dancer without that grounding in classical technique.
It is no coincidence that the great Mikhail Baryshnikov, who bestrode both worlds, was and remains a founding patron of the Michael Clark Company.
And what a fine company it is. Dancing to a soundtrack of Scritti Politti, Pulp, Relaxed Muscle, Public Image Ltd and the Sex Pistols, the sextet produced patterns of disciplined delight in a dazzling array of costumes, intercutting stark monochrome sleekness with flashes of brilliant colour.
Their dancing was quite brilliant in the faster, more exacting routines. Yet at quieter points, their taut moments of stillness spoke at least as eloquently as their more breathtaking sequences.
Sometimes you can learn more about a dancer when they are required to be still than when they must produce a maelstrom of movement.
So it is perhaps picky to seek small fault in the absence of absolute excellence. But it is, and probably will always be, the albatross around these dancers’ necks that they are not Michael Clark. He may seek and strive to create a company in his own image. But he was different – and he i s doomed to eternal disappointment.
Nonetheless, this was still a very fine performance from a very fine company.
It’s just a crying shame that the dancers didn’t get the full house they deserved.