It employs a large company of 32 dancers, and what is most unusual is that you can’t tell which are men and which are women — you seldom get a glimpse of a face.
The dancers are dressed unisexly in suits and ties, raincoats and fedoras (the brims pulled down), the colours drab brown or slate. Huddled in a tight group, they could be a nest of mice. Dispersed around the stage, in arrested motion, leaning backwards or forwards, they suggest a Lowry painting of anonymous souls. Rushing to one side of the proscenium arch, rebounding and running back to the other, they are like a shoal of fish with short memories.
Their anonymity is the point in this epic signature piece by Perreault, the French-Canadian choreographer who died in 2002. It was created 20 years ago, acquired a cult reputation and is now making a farewell world tour, which takes in London (Sadler’s Wells) in October. It seems strange that it hasn’t been seen in Britain before now, but it was worth the wait.
I haven’t yet mentioned the heavy leather boots, which supply the aural support for the visual regimentations of this human herd. The rhythmic variations are endless — goose-step marching, running, stamping, tapping, a percussive marvel that is interrupted by sudden silences (the audience pin-drop quiet). This is humanity forced into conformity. Perreault’s own set design, of stark simplicity, features a steep ramp leading to a huge wall of window-like panels, but they are windows to nowhere. Runs up the ramp may be frantic attempts to escape, but end in falls, collapses and rolling back down.
One man (yes, at this point we can tell, as he has discarded his coat) briefly breaks out on his own, with a desperate tap routine, but the rest, square-bashing in tight formation, remain impervious and march over him. This is both frightening and funny. Perreault does allow laughs now and again: a couple get in a spot of clowning. They may be the same pair who saunter off together at the climax — it’s hard to know, because the subtle lighting, by Jean Gervais, puts them in the dark. Yet this seems to signify a ray of hope for them, as all the others have been left stamping in unison on the ramp. This is a compelling work, not least for the dancers’ brilliant physical co-ordination, dauntless stamina and sheer feat of memory.
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On the Fringe, Aurora Nova, at St Stephens, is in its third season of hosting a wide-ranging, self-contained festival of international physical theatre and dance. A clear success this time is Renegade Theatre, from Germany, in Rumble, a highly energetic production by Markus Michalowski, choreo- graphed by Lorca Renoux, that transposes Romeo and Juliet into the world of hip-hop.
There is more than a hint of West Side Story here, with a setting of two scaffolding tower blocks on which the street kids swing and cackle like monkeys, and the wide-boy Mercutio (Frederik Rohn) performs gymnastics. The rumble on the streets, to a drum and saxophone jazz score, provokes miracles of athleticism from this multinational team of breakdance virtuosos. I don’t know the names for all those dazzling moves — leg-knittings, body poppings, handless somersaults, gyroscope twists. One irrepressible chap, Christian Gamattar (as Balthasar), with a woolly hat as necessary protection, spins on his head like a top for awesome ages.
The hip-hop medium, with snatches of speech, conveys the pared-down story surprisingly well. There is an episode with everyone in beaky white masks that I didn’t quite follow, and a jazz-dance divertissement. Seven of the cast are men, but the two women are equally daredevil. Juliet (Ulrike Reinbott) is a feisty girl whose balcony duet with Romeo (Fatih Alan) includes one-hand up-end stands. The lovers commit suicide by jumping off a wall — she, cleverly, in slow motion. But the actual climax of this novel show is an exuberant knees-up — or anything else that can be done with limbs — to reprise each performer’s speciality tricks.
With much of the Fringe dance programme geared to contemporary styles, or ethnic, or downright exotic (the latter spearheaded, as always, by the redoubtable grande dame Shakti and her Japan Experience melange at The Garage), small-scale classical ballet is never prominent. But a London-based project-company of classically trained dancers, Balletomania, run by Sheila Styles, the former Royal Ballet artist, is performing at C in Chambers Street for an Edinburgh debut season in an intriguing double bill, The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name. Both pieces are choreographed by Styles, to scenarios by Polly Fowler. The linking theme is obvious. Possession, set to Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite, which includes Tea for Two among its tunes, depicts a Parisian soirée of the 1930s, hosted by Gertrude Stein (played by a man in drag, Ian MacKenzie Stewart) and Alice B Toklas, with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso and Colette as the guests. Amours, jealousies and clashing egos are evoked in the dances of this neatly worked comedy of decadent manners.
Ballet Rimbaud is the punning title of the second piece, in which Styles deals with the tempestuous, absinthe-fuelled love affair of the poets Rimbaud and Verlaine, and the involvements of the former’s mother and the latter’s wife. Violence and passion are dramatically expressed in vigorous and complex choreography, set to an unusual choice of music, songs by the Doors. Adam Gullidge and Steven Windsor are especially impressive as the male duo, with Justine Berri and Emma Brunton elegant and eloquent in the female leads. There are plans to bring these pieces, with a third completing a themed trilogy, to London in November.