Lovely. But, er, what?

Rosas
D’un soir un jour
Dance Umbrella 2006 (II)
Monday 16 October, Sadlers Wells

Formally conceived as a cyclical musical journey and, by its title, suggesting the passage of an evening and a day, the presentation of six new choreographic episodes from Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas was ostensibly alluring, weird, serious-minded and technically challenging but at the same time baffling, obscure and almost wilfully impenetrable.

De Keersmaeker is famous for her obsession with music and pure movement and her score here is a rich and classical one: Debussy, Stravinsky, Benjamin, including an original composition from the latter. The performance opens with Rosas’ homage to Nijinsky’s “Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faun” casting a topless woman in the central role in a sparse and abstract piece for three dancers, the incorporation of Nijinsky’s famous angular poses providing a recognisable link to the original. The following pieces, in spite of the glorious music, leave the audience bemused. The second half is more engaging. Stravinsky’s “Fireworks” offers a fun and throwaway parade of exuberance and the final piece, “Jeux”, derived from Nijinsky’s controversial work of the same name, incorporates a clip from the film “Blow up” featuring a mimed tennis match. This starts promisingly but, again, the choreography disappoints, failing to communicate or subtly elucidate its laminated references.

The set is beautifully styled; an exposed, stripped bare Sadlers’ stage cut across by a rack of strip lights that rise or lower to change the mood. The white stage is coated with chalk dust that puffs up evocatively with the movement. The dancers too are a beautiful, kooky cast, colour coordinated in muted shades of gold, green, purple and blue, randomly spliced with boys and girls in mismatched suit trousers and vests and the odd incongruous woman in jeans and a spangly top straight off the high street. There is sporadic nudity.

But it’s as if the styling has sucked the life out of the choreography. The dance vocabulary is both difficult to grasp and not strange or beautiful enough to merely wash over the senses pleasurably. Extensive explanatory programme notes serve to annoy further.

Even an attempt to just enjoy the aesthetics of this programme is spoiled by the relentless and apparently depthless intellectualism that seems to beg to be acknowledged throughout. “D’un soir un jour” feels like the ultimate in continental boho styling, set to a gorgeous and exciting orchestral score and with a grand shape and concept, yet tiresomely, it fails to speak to, or move, its audience,

Take: those interested in postmodern european aesthetics

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