Rambert: Ghost Dances

★★★★☆  Bitty

Festival Theatre: Wed 23-Fri 25 Nov 2016
Review by Thom Dibdin

Vicious, enthralling, politically charged and emotionally engaging, Rambert’s revival of Ghost Dances, is still powerful, 35 years after it was created.

The final part of a triple bill, playing the Festival Theatre to Friday, it was choreographed by Christopher Bruce as a reaction to the disappearances – murders – of civilians during the Pinochet regime in Chile in the early 1970s.

Tomorrow by Guerin Photo: Johan Persson

Using the music and ritual masks of Chile, Bruce has imagined a trio of skeletal ghosts. Dancers who appear from the darkness of the stage, beneath an abstractly mountainous backdrop, meet ordinary people on the road and dance the dance of death with them.

It’s all given the big sinuous moves and precision that has become Rambert’s hallmark. The added resonance is the sound of pan-pipes, played live, which seem to bring life to the ghostly figures.

The ordinary folk make their travels across the stage, breaking into their own dances, sometimes of celebration, but mostly they seem to be simply of existence. Their deaths are spotlit moments of calm, sometimes unnoticed as the ghosts displace the dead to dance with the partners, at other times obvious as they come among the people.

As a piece of dance if has its own beauty and creation of a meaning, without having to know anything about the circumstances it was written for. It has a sense of the universal about it, despite the strongly South American setting, which speaks of the violent and wrongful taking of life in any time.

a certain gorgeousness

Beside this cleverly created dance which speaks on many levels, its companion pieces provide a certain gorgeousness in their delivery, but lack its depth.

Frames by Alexander Whitley Photo: Tristram Kenton

The programme’s opening piece, Tomorrow, is particularly impervious to comprehension. As it stands on stage, with a physical barrier running down the middle between two sets if dancers, it is an intellectual conundrum. The difficulty is that the dance itself offers no clues as to what its solution might be.

On one side are seven black-clad living beings. On the other are seven white clad ghostly figures. The living dancers seem to do a lot of killing of one another and the ghosts seem to celebrate it a lot.

It takes a look at choreographer Lucy Guerin’s programme note to know that this is a version of Macbeth. One side of the stage being a representation (running backwards of course) of the action in the play. The other side representing the witches and the psychic elements of Shakespeare’s story.

wilfully obtuse

Maybe, armed with that knowledge, the piece would make sense. The fact that the music is by Scanner and is played live is enough to make it an interesting event to witness, but otherwise Guerin seems to be being wilfully obtuse for the sake of it.

The irony is that Tomorrow is appears to be the perfect example of what the second piece, Frames, is attempting to talk about. Here, using bits of metal pole for the dances to manipulate, choreographer Alexander Whitley is examining the impermanence of dance as an art form, leaving nothing tangible after it has happened.

A ghostly pair of dances, then, making them in some way the perfect couplings with Ghost Dances. Which, itself, gives the lie to Frames‘ central idea by leaving a strong and indelible mark on the memories of those who witness it.

Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes (including two intervals).
Festival Theatre, 13/29 Nicolson Street EH8 9FT
Wednesday 23 – Friday 25 November 2016
Evenings: 7.30 pm
Tickets from: www.edtheatres.com

Rambert website: www.rambert.org.uk

ENDS

Tags: Alexander Whitley, Christopher Bruce, Dance, Festival Theatre, Ghost Dancers, Lucy Guerin, Rambert Dance Company, Review