Rambert began the evening with Lucinda Childs’ Four Elements. As the title suggests the work falls into four sections: Water, Earth, Air and Fire danced to Gavin Bryars’ unsettling score.
The artistic, styled backdrops were mirrored in tartan, playing card, domino and skeleton patterned costumes. Water begins and is slow with elegant, repetitive movements of a reflective nature. Earth, performed by four women follows and is more up tempo. My favourite part, Air, was much faster and performed by four men who repeatedly skipped and jumped across the stage from one wing to another. Fire danced by all eight dancers under a red hue was again slower and much the same as earlier parts. The piece ends unexpectedly with the dancer dressed as a skeleton left on stage to be showered by a confetti of playing cards. Overall the piece was elegant and danced skilfully however the repetitive feel of the steps made three of the four parts feel rather homogenous.
Next followed The Strange Charm of Mother Nature. This was a brand new work by Rambert’s Artistic Director Mark Baldwin which was inspired by the six quarks (up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm), particles that make up matter and ultimately the Universe. Set to a diverse orchestral score, this piece of three movements blended physicality, light and sound to perfection. The dancers demonstrated the different colour, mass and spin of the quarks ably and affirmed their place as Britain’s National Dance Company.
In stark contrast to the first two performances, the final and well known crowd-pleaser of the evening was Rooster. Based upon former artistic director Christopher Bruce’s memories of his 1960s years and danced to a soundtrack of eight Rolling Stones songs, Rooster was much anticipated by the audience. But have the Company got the moves like Jagger? Oh you bet! And many many more!!
Miguel Altunaga arrives on stage, velvet suited, preening and comically pecking across the stage. Later joined by a crowd of similarly dressed sharp-suited peacocks, the men want to impress and show-off to the ladies who are sometimes interested, and at other times not. Contrasting genres of dance are revealed from the formal court like dances in Lady Jane to the balletic solo of Ruby Tuesday. There were two particular highlights for me. The first was the high energy dancing of Paint It Black where classic 60s shimmying and shaking dance moves by sassy young women worked remarkably well alongside those of the balletic genre and the second was the stunningly superb duet in Play with Fire.
Rambert demonstrated their versatility across the 3 different works. Whilst the first two might not have appealed to everyone in the audience there is no doubt that Rooster was more than worth the wait. I defy anyone that witnessed this work not to have wished they were up on the stage dancing too!