Following the performances of Rain in London. Rosas began their UK tour with another rumination on the music of Steve Reich.
Dome Concert Hall, Brighton
23 Oct 2002
One defining characteristic of minimalist music is its momentum, but for a force ploughing forward so incessantly, when it comes to a close it often hasn’t arrived anywhere. So it follows that dancing to minimalist music may not be about journeying, more a case of inhabiting the space between the first and last notes. In this case 60 minutes of Steve Reich’s Drumming.
It makes sense to think about this dance from the perspective of the composition – after all, the music came first. The piece is built with layers of percussive patterns. Each instrument plays a single simple pattern repeatedly, but the introduction of overlapping rhythmic cells makes a much more complex fabric, and the falling in and out of parts along with slight adjustments of the rhythms creates subtle shifts in accent and colour and reveals inner rhythms and syncopations. There is no stabilising fixed pulse, the music just rushes downstream.
At its best, de Keersmaeker’s choreography follows the same course. Twelve dancers pacing and repacing their own paths, picking up partners, falling into small groups or disinterestedly single, their steps threading through each other’s passage to make an intricate cloth, an indivisible, ever-shifting whole.
Their movements are simple and sometimes childlike; arms make clean horizontal sweeps, wrists whip around head, legs swing like pendulums and dancers make several small jumps on the spot. These single cells of movement are joined in one stream, a kinetic chain.
As the music opens with a single rhythm, the dance begins with a solo. A single female dancer dressed in white with a loose orange shirt skitters through an invisible maze, making small shuffling runs. She looks like she could be working in reverse, retracing her path. A male dancer joins her, dressed in black and cast in shadow. He matches her steps, but in opposition. Two more dancers come into the centre, one drops out, then three join, building the texture, repeating steps in different directions and groupings until the whole company is dancing to the same beat. All bar the singular orange shirt who hears her own tune, weaving through their strict formations and still pursuing her winding path.
Slight changes of lighting echo the slight shifts in accent and focus among the mesmeric repetitions. One dancer shouts cues to the company – it must be a mean feat of concentration to keep each cog whirring constantly, but there are moments of hiatus. Dancers disperse leaving a couple centre stage, or our orange shirt setting out the L-shaped corner of a square, back and forth, again and again. We only ever reach a lidded climax, this piece doesn’t explode, it mutates.
In the first phase unpitched drums have left moments of space between the rhythmic weave. When the xylophone and other tuned percussion enter you suddenly have what you might loosely call a tune, albeit a tightly looped one, and a wall of sound. This shift brings warmer lighting and two couples show the first contact and connection between the dancers. They slow down enough to look at one another, one pair face each other at opposite sides of the stage slowly raising a perfectly controlled straight leg, foot flexed, in mirror image. I don’t think it’s the first time we’ve seen this movement but we have to look at it a different way, it shines against the busy backdrop.
There are some equally lovely moments for larger groups of dancers, five in a line bend backwards in a pliant curve, or raise straight arms with zen-like serenity, tuning in to deeper layers of the rhythm rather than the frantic surface.
For all the orchestration this is unregimented dance, sometimes unpolished, and all the more alive for it. It rides with the rhythms, is propelled by percussion, it doesn’t seek the skies, or dwell too much on the ground, it doesn’t go over, under or round but straight through.
As the pitch rises and the texture is drawn more taut, one man begins to pick up dancers one by one, placing them at the side of the stage, picking apart the material. It’s the only time it feels like someone is physically shaping this dance. The music is winding higher and higher and feels like it can’t go any further. But then a new pulse enters, and it begins again – a second wind, as it were. It’s like a reprise but the pace has been upped, intensified. Groups are leaping in all directions, making a run straight to the audience and at each other, jumping in unison then splintering and setting off a chain of movement in an ultra-stylised game of tag.
Then suddenly the music stops and the dancers halt. We expected this and yet it’s surprising. We felt like we’d had enough but now we could lap up more. Once you’ve adjusted to the pace you could keep on going – what you would discover is questionable, you wouldn’t find yourself anywhere different, but revelling in the restless energy is enough.