Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, Friday 4 June 2004

© Chris Nash

Bringing NDT2 to Inverness may be the contemporary dance equivalent of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s visit to Forres a couple of years ago, the difference being that everyone has heard of the RSC and most have a nodding acquaintance with The Merchant of Venice. But the Highland audience for contemporary dance is still small: barely 100 turned out for the talented Edinburgh company theensemblegroup at Eden Court just a week earlier.  In fact, there had been an air of schadenfreude around Inverness for some time, with stories of poor advance sales for the world-famous company. The question was being asked: had Eden Court’s Director, Colin Marr, over-reached himself?

In the event, the doubters were proved wrong. There was almost a full house for the first of NDT2’s two evenings, and the very mixed audience (8 to 80) gave the company a standing ovation and cheered them to the lighting gantry. At a time when government is beginning to debate the concept of ‘cultural entitlement’ it was good to see a crucial point demonstrated: offer an audience the very best, and they’ll know it when they see it, even if the idiom is unfamiliar.

It was nonetheless a strange feeling to watch a company familiar from past Edinburgh Festivals performing here in the Highlands—almost a kind of double take: was this Eden Court, or the Edinburgh Festival Theatre?  But then, halfway through the first piece, two women stood up and exited noisily at the first glimpse of a pair of naked breasts.  Yes, we were still in Inverness.

Nederlands Dans Theatre, originally founded in 1957, is now three companies in one. NDT2 is the youth wing (no dancer is older than 25), and is this year celebrating its 25th anniversary. NDT3, by contrast, only engages dancers over 40–let’s hope that remarkable company can also be tempted to Inverness in the future. NDT2 offers an irresistable combination: on the one hand, the exclusively classically-trained dancers already have phenomenal technical skill, but on the other, their youth gives them an exhilarating energy and stamina. You felt they could literally have danced all night.

Not taking any prisoners, the company opened with the most austere and introverted work of the evening. 27’52” (the work’s duration) is a  recent piece by Jiri Kylian, who for almost 30 years has been the presiding genius of NDT as a whole.  It’s an intense distillation of recurrent themes in Kylian’s work: an obsession with time (both the speech soundtrack, and the dancers’ movements, go into reverse at various points) and with the act of dance itself, and the artificiality of its presentation on a stage. By the end everything has been stripped away: the dance floor, the lights (yes, even clothes) and the final startling image is of two great lengths of drape crashing to the stage from the flies.  It was  a risky step to introduce the company with such a work: its uncompromising character could have lost those audience members who were unfamiliar with the language of contemporary dance.  But such was the mesmerising concentration of the dancers that even first-timers were won over.

Paul Lightfoot and Sol Leon’s brief duet Shutters Shut—a daft setting of Gertrude Stein reading her own daft poem—was an appropriate sorbet to cleanse the palate before Subject to Change by the same two choreographers: an intense and visually sumptuous ballet set to the slow movement of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden in Mahler’s full orchestral version (played at Eden Court a couple of seasons ago by the Scottish Ensemble). On a huge red carpet a couple dance a passionate and despairing duet as the doom-laden music rolls out.  Four dark-suited young men are threatening presences, whirling the carpet so that the static dancer in the centre rotates before our eyes, or rippling it to upset the couple’s fragile stability. A perfect match of movement to music.

But the best was yet to come.  The programme disarmingly admitted that Ohad Naharin’s Minus 16 came about by putting together sections of his previous works, and the juxtapositions were certainly startling: from gut-wrenching traditional Israeli music to Dean Martin at his smoothest. At the heart of the piece were two bold and unexpected attempts to reach across the footlights and link dancers and audience.  First, as the sixteen dancers, all clad in identical black suits, processed line abreast back and forth across the stage, each in turn would break away for an exuberant and personal solo, set to a recording of their own voice, talking about themselves and their approach to dance, and life.  What could have been sentimental was in fact sincere and touching (and has to be the only modern dance piece to include a soup recipe).  Then, as the houselights came up, the dancers stepped down into the auditorium, scanning the audience, and singling out individuals whom, without speaking, they drew onto the stage and into the dance. What followed was both astonishing and inspiring: these sixteen unsuspecting audience members integrated beautifully with the dancers’ movements, creating an improvised ballet filled with humour and charm.   Mind you, the company have sharp eyes: I spotted at least one trained dancer and one professional actor among the audience participants!

The ballet, and the evening, ended with a liberating burst of fast, rhythmic dance for the whole company, and, after all the bows and acknowledgements of the applause, the final image, as the curtain came down for the last time, was of this remarkable young company, still dancing furiously.

Usually, after such an exciting and stimulating evening, the euphoria is undercut by a sense of flatness—when will we get the chance to see such work again?  But hey!  The Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane company play Eden Court on 25 and 26 June! Riches indeed.
© Robert Livingston, 2004