CHRISTOPHER BRUCE, the director of Rambert, is a good, kind man with a sensitive conscience about the world's evils, which he has used to make one or two memorable and provocative dances. But recently his weltschmerz has been getting out of control, infecting Rambert's programming with crepuscular gloom, leading him to make poor ballets and certainly not providing much of a party for the audience.
The lack of smiles on offer in their second Sadler's Wells programme evidently wore more than just me down. I saw at least two dozen people quitting the show early.
Once before, Rambert bored its audience into desertion, under Richard Alston in 1993, whereupon Bruce was rushed in to lighten it up. However, although under Bruce Rambert have performed a wide-ranging and extremely distinguished roster of dances they seem nowadays unable to thread these into decently entertaining programmes.
The first Sadler's Wells evening was redeemed from mediocrity only by a glistening Cunningham masterwork; the second evening swung between soullessness and soulfulness, with Bruce at his most conscience-stricken.
There was most spark in the opening item, an intriguing little piece by Rafael Bonachela, a short, shaven-headed Rambert dancer, part elf, part pugilist. Linear Remains exemplifies the current trend of younger British choreographers towards an extreme abstractness of jagged, disconnected moves and ticky, clicky electronic pulses.
Up to a point one is held by watching Rambert's finely tuned, highly individual dancers pushing their bodies to extremes, but 15 minutes is about the maximum period of attractiveness. Like Jeremy James's familiar, hard-edged Gaps, Lapse and Relapse, the other item for the "young" tendency in the audience, Linear Remains has that earnest, mechanical perfectionism of people energetically working as small cogs in a higher scheme, with no emotional or spiritual food other than the work itself. Being shorter, it is easier to swallow than James's, which is short on the ingenious, cog-like meshing of bodies that made his best pieces compelling.
To get, on top of these, Bruce's Land and Grinning in Your Face, about misery in the Second World War and the American Depression, made for a dispiriting night.
Bruce's dances can be sharp and amusingly observant, but when he gets onto politics he all too often sinks into sweeping generalisations about noble, exploited women and aggressive, exploiting men. Grinning, having its London premiere, frames folksy mating dances in the American dustbowl with a married couple (Miranda Lind and Simon Cooper) whose rocky progress is hinted at but undeveloped.
Land (1985) is a quiet, more strongly visualised dance, which etches one or two strong images into the air, men screeching in to pillage, gentle women scattering. But a lot of this material has been regurgitated in other Bruces, not least Grinning. There is a place for the soapbox in dance, but the audience deserves some joy, too.
- Theatre Royal, Plymouth (01752 267222), Wed-next Sat; then touring from Feb
