National Dance Company Wales continues its steady ascent up the cultural ladder. About 18 months ago it was rebranded, having been founded nearly three decades ago as Diversions. With the new name has come a renewed creative impetus.
This spring the company is touring with new commissions from a trio of international choreographers. I was unable to see Gustavo Ramirez Sansano’s Quixoteland, based on Cervantes, but the double-bill in Cardiff earlier this week showed the company’s 11 dancers on spectacularly good form. If full-on contemporary dance is what you’re after, with striking design and music, then this work is just the ticket.
Romance Inverse by the Israeli-born Itzik Galili is a one-act dance in two halves, each with its own score. In the first section, set to Steve Reich’s pulsating music, five women in sheer tops, black shorts and tails pass through waves of perpetual motion. Meanwhile, anonymous men in dark suits are continually shifting square panels, black on one side and white on the other, thus redefining and reframing the stage.
In the second half the panels are replaced by a peripatetic cube of headlamp-like lights and the men, no longer in suits, join in. The dancing becomes earthier, more floor-bound and tribal especially when set to the rolling, densely layered rhythms of the percussive ensemble Percossa. The entire piece has a hypnotically unsettled energy. Galili is using those panels and light itself to create dimension and alter our perception of bodies and space.
Dylan Thomas’s poetry was a springboard for Son Lux’s score for By Shining Light, choreographed by the American Stephen Petronio. It’s a big, impressively pyrotechnical composition featuring distorted sound, vibrant beats and, in Cardiff only, members of the BBC National Chorus of Wales singing live a few songs by the late Mansel Thomas. The music’s volcanic power is matched by the movement. It starts with dancers, bare-legged in white, long-sleeved shirts, creating a series of tableaux of collective collapse and support. Later all change to leotards — black, red, grey or brocade. Their steps are charged and the bold, spiralling shapes their bodies make seem ripe with ecstasy.
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Mar 24-25, Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Co Wicklow; Mar 29, Wexford Opera House. Tour continues until June 14; ndcwales.co.uk