Sadler’s Wells, London
NDT present four pieces including a brilliant reunion for Betroffenheit’s Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young
Nederlands Dans Theater is a company of outstanding dancers and variable choreography. The gap looks widest in Shoot the Moon by house choreographers Sol León and Paul Lightfoot, a distended piece portraying two involuted relationships, one a pairing, the other a triangle. The marvellous rotating set shows three flock-walled interiors, interconnected by doors and windows, and the dance style, characteristically, uses a bedrock of ballet technique topped with a thick layer of mannerism: affected gesticulations, agape mouths, relentless stop-start phrasing. Philip Glass’s score wallpapers along in the background, and the whole piece feels like a classy commercial with serious-drama ambitions.
At first, Marco Goecke’s Woke Up Blind, to songs by Jeff Buckley, seems cut from the same middlebrow cloth, more or less ignoring Buckley’s swoopingly emotive vocals in favour of gestural quirks and elastic leg extensions. But once it starts tapping the musical force, the piece sparks into life with a thrumming, fire-in-the-belly energy that burns through its seven dancers’ polished technique.
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