Synopsis
Programme
Impressions/Performances
Phoenix Dance Theatre's latest tour concoction, "Crossing Points" is a mixed programme of diverse dance pieces that genuinely lives up to it's name - four short pieces that with enough diversity in style and pace to appeal to a wide audience and keep every single viewer enthralled throughout.
The opening piece, Catch, is a twenty minute work for six dancers, three boys and three girls, inspired by the René Magritte painting, The Son of Man. The piece opens with the six performers in business attire marching across the stage, criss-crossing and making sharp turns and eventually ending crushed together in a log-jam - much like an everyday scene on the streets of London. Then the choreography opens up and takes on a more surreal and animalistic edge as the dancers begin to divest themselves of their cumbersome attire, stripping down to vests and mens underpants. At the close, this abstract world is dominated by a rope dangling in a corner of the stage which becomes the focus of the dancers attention, although it seems to sting any who touch it.
Next came the oldest piece in the collection, Henri Oguike's Signal, an energetic martial piece set to the thundering tribal percussion of Japanese Taiko drums. Opening with just one dancer dressed in a red bodysuit, he is soon joined by four more who come and go in different combinations, the choreography changing in pace and energy as it contrasts themes conjuring the hue and cry of the battlefield with the deceptive calm in the eye of a storm. Toward the end, a curtain raises to reveal a row of fire-pots as the music and choreography increase in energy toward a thrilling conclusion.
The third piece, the humourously inventive Maybe Yes Maybe, Maybe No Maybe, is a real crowd pleaser - set to the music of Street Furniture and the dancers own vocalisations. A live microphone hangs over the centre of the stage and the five dancers compete over it in a succession of gutteral grunts, wows, miaows and cheek-pops - the sounds they make then becoming central to the soundtrack for the choreography that follows. Lively and witty and played very much for fun, it is clearly a piece which the dancers enjoy every bit as much as the audience, their capering antics being interspersed with occasional moments of pure slapstick.
The final piece of the evening, Sound Clash, a brand new work by Kwesi Johnson with input from the Phoenix dancers, was, perhaps, the most compelling, using choreography inspired by the shapes and undulations of sound waves set to a pulsing score by Luke Harney. A projection onto the back wall of the stage showed ripples on the surface of a tray of water created by the rhythm of the music, with the movements of the dancers attempting to echo these complex patterns - sometimes moving together, sometimes in mirror-image.
The show as a a whole was yet another breathtaking display of visceral dance athleticism by this very talented troupe. The astonishing physicality of the performers, as much gymnasts as dancers, is evident in the precise intensity of every movement, their bodies perfectly in tune with the rhythms of the music, leading to some truly heart-stopping moments. As a showcase of four distinctively unique dance pieces, each highly meritorious in their own rights, this production is certainly a powerful and exhilarating exhibition of some of the best that talent and movement that modern contemporary dance has to offer. But, more than that, the four contrasting pieces, whilst appearing, prima facie, to be somewhat at odds, actually work together rather well, each stirring different emotions that, in the memory, come together in the crossing points of the title, and leaving the viewer at the end of the evening emotionally satisfied on every level.
Verdict
A breath-taking display of diverse dance athleticism.
Don Gillan - www.stagebeauty.net