An ambitious triple bill from Phoenix Dance Theatre, a Leeds-based company of more than 40 years’ standing, features an intermittently arresting world premiere from the new artistic director, Marcus Jarrell Willis; a heartfelt, full-bodied work from his predecessor, Dane Hurst; and a problematic world premiere from the Cuban-born dancer turned choreographer Miguel Altunaga. Under the umbrella title BELONGING: Loss. Legacy. Love, all benefit from the expressive strength and commitment of the company’s eight exemplary lead dancers.
The evening’s curtain-raiser is a beauty. Springboarding from a personal loss during the Covid pandemic, Hurst originally staged his take on Mozart’s Requiem in 2023 as part of a double bill created in collaboration with Opera North and a brace of South African companies. (You can view the 50-minute performance on BBC iPlayer.) For touring purposes, the work has been artfully reduced to excerpts, minus live music.
Casually clad in muted tones with just a hint of shimmer (the costumes are by Joanna Parker), the dancers move seamlessly in a limbo-like space anchored by two low benches. They beseech and lament, rising and falling, carrying and consoling each other. The net result is reverential and earthy.
Willis’s Terms of Agreement is the third in a series of dances that explore responses to the question “What is true love?” The space is defined by a sextet of wide, white-topped and illuminated tables.
The cast look stylish in black and white garb vividly accented by red socks. The soundtrack is a blend of often contemplative instrumental and contemporary pop recordings by artists including JVKE, Labrinth and Wasia Project, plus poetic spoken text by Tomos O’Sullivan. Is this a nightclub, a party or something more sober? A series of somewhat amorphous vignettes are boldly yet sensitively performed, and streaked with melancholy.
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In between these two full-company works comes Altunaga’s Cloudburst, a kinetically busy but woolly-minded quintet billed as an exploration of “mankind’s relationship to tribe and community, mythology and spirituality”.
Backed by three triangular pillars, dancers in white pointy-shouldered jumpsuits jerk, gyrate, strut and scrabble through a tiresome drama of exaggerated suffering and rapacious brutishness. This is cartoonish, mystifying and dispiriting — but credit to the dancers for not holding back.
★★★☆☆
120min
Ends February 23. Touring until May 4. phoenixdancetheatre.co.uk
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