Zeleidy Crespo steals the show in Carlos Acosta’s 100% Cuban

Carlos Acosta has always been determined to foster the art form that (quite literally) kept him off the streets when he was a young tearaway in 1980s Havana. His earliest solo ventures took care to promote Cuban dance and dancemaking, and in 2016 he founded his own company, Acosta Danza, which returned to Sadler’s Wells on Wednesday to begin a four-week UK tour.

Cuba’s numerous dance schools — from the National Ballet School to the newly founded Academia Acosta — generate vibrant, athletic performers at a remarkable rate and 100% Cuban is a fine advertisement for their training. But choreographers are not so easily grown and, as on previous visits, Acosta’s choice of material seldom makes best use of his dancers’ gifts.

Norge Cedeño’s Hybrid features a cast of 10 dressed by Celia Ledón in the sort of Greco-Roman stretchwear favoured by 1960s TV sci-fi. Cedeño’s thesis is the myth of Sisyphus and “the power of dance to deal with the challenges of life”, all of which is thrashed out in a tireless 24-minute trolley-dash through the dance-cliché megastore. The ensemble cluster like sea anemones, collapse in canon, hurl themselves into somersaults and play cats cradle with sundry bits of red string. The stage is bathed in sickly red light with a smoke machine on overtime. Cedeño’s writing exploits the dancers’ versatility to the full, but the queasy lurches between twerks and pirouettes — what sociolinguists call “code-switching” — is enough to give you the bends.

The closing ensemble, De Punta a Cabo by Alexis Fernández (aka Maca) is marginally more successful but is overbalanced by its decor, a beguiling projection of Havana’s Malecón sea wall. The painterly dusk-to-dawn skyscape gives shape to the action but tends to pull focus from the 14 dancers on stage.

Pontus Lidberg’s 2019 ensemble Paysage, Soudain, la nuit is a low-key but beguiling interlude in this frustrating programme. Lidberg deploys his 11 dancers with sly wit, magicking them on and offstage with a sleight of hand worthy of Mark Morris. The dancers mesh into tight formation then hiccup out of unison or peel away into sudden solos, dancing with a throwaway insouciance that matches the delicate rhythms of the (taped) Leo Brouwer soundtrack.

The evening’s only other highlights were supplied by Zeleidy Crespo, star of the company’s 2019 visit. Shaven-headed and sublimely statuesque, her every move is mesmerising. The solo, Impronta by Catalan dancemaker Maria Rovira (the only non-Cuban creative in the line-up), does little more than remind us of Crespo’s startling flexibility but this is a dancer who invariably transcends her material.

In Raúl Reínosos’s Liberto, she is the mystery woman encountered by Mario Sergio Elías’s runaway slave. The bonelessly agile Elías syncs his body to the automatic fire of Pepe Gavilondo’s percussive score like a human music visualiser. Reínoso’s pairwork makes full use of Crespo’s wiry strength — one travelling lift simply hooks a long leg around her partner’s neck — and at the close she emerges gowned and gilded in full goddess drag before exiting stage left, Elías cowering in her wake.

★★★☆☆

To February 12, then touring to March 5, danceconsortium.com