★★★☆☆
Strong dancing distinguishes this mixed bill from the 35-year-old, Leeds-based Phoenix Dance Theatre, who are touring the UK until mid-June. Each evening contains three works chosen from a possible four. Three were created by female choreographers, a hot topic in British dance these days where it’s often men who seem to be given the high-profile opportunities.
The programme in Watford kicked off with Melt by Phoenix’s artistic director, Sharon Watson. Ice, and what happens to it as it warms, was a key inspiration for this facile, cool-toned and somewhat anodyne piece created in 2010. A cast of seven, attractive in Heidi de Raad’s crinkly white pyjama costumes, wheel about with a softened angularity, spiralling or swinging from suspended straps to the music of the British indie rock band Wild Beasts.
The night’s sole new work was Kate Flatt’s Undivided Loves. Although no more groundbreaking than anything else on the bill, this trio benefits from Flatt’s attention to craft and the subtly ambiguous emotional layering she has tried to establish between the dancers.
They riff selectively off five of Shakespeare’s sonnets, snippets of which we occasionally hear on the soundtrack but, alas, too flatly delivered by Prentice Whitlow. Muscular and rangey, he plays a kind of poetic dreamer lounging on a mattress surrounded by sheafs of paper.
Whitlow is also at the top of what could be construed as a love triangle completed by Marie-Astrid Mence and Sam Vaherlehto, the elegant but lively embodiments of his fertile romantic imagination. Adriano Adewale’s score for percussion, voice and string lends Flatt’s modest, fairly engaging dance a fresh, Afro-Brazilian flavour.
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The evening’s climax was Itzik Galili’s dynamic Until.With/Out.Enough, dating from 1997 but revamped for Phoenix last year. The movement, blunt and visceral, is cued to Henryk Gorecki’s brooding, throbbing music. Among the seven dancers Vaherlehto and Vanessa Vince-Pang especially exulted in the work’s rampant drama, strikingly lit by Yaron Abulafia.
Touring to June 17, phoenixdancetheatre.co.uk