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Tiger Dancing
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
7 May 2006
Henri Oguike Dance
Company
Britten Sinfonia
Live music can lift dancing, opening it out. From the earliest days of
his company, now seven years old, Henri Oguike brought in musicians whenever
he could afford them. This show, a collaboration between Oguike's company
and the Britten Sinfonia, offered two London premieres and some grandly
expansive dancing.
Oguike's dancers respond to
the musicians. I've never seen them show such attack and assured phrasing.
Backs and feet are cleanly stretched, limbs swung boldly. The movement
texture can be as lush as the string playing.
Oguike's setting of Tippett's
Concerto for Double String Orchestra is a pastoral celebration. His nine
dancers, in white and green, group themselves in chain dances, cutting
into solos and duets, each with a hand clasping the next person's elbow.
They half-crouch, knees bent, hips swung; they often stop in position,
making a background for other dances.
In lines and small groups,
his dancers shuffle and dip, shoulders swinging. For a moment, the women
look like flappers, with a hint of 1920-30s social dance: Tippett's score
is a 20th-century pastoral. Music may be central to Oguike, but he sometimes
cuts against his scores. I love many of the steps in this Tippett, but
they don't always tell me about the music.
Oguike strains for some effects.
In the Tippett, the cast leave the stage to walk through the audience;
there are a few too many bright smiles, some patterns that lose impetus.
But this programme shows a choreographer making dances of real ease and
freedom.
Tiger Dancing, to a score commissioned
from Steve Martland, starts with the poem by William Blake, but creates
a very different mood. The music is full of plucked strings and springy
lines: lively rather than fierce, with no fearful symmetries. Oguike gives
his dancers sinuous, feline movements, but nothing cutesy; when they drop
to hands and knees, they hold their arms spread wide in stark angles.
The evening opened with the
Britten Sinfonia in Edward Gregson's Stepping Out, the strings cutting
across each other in different phrases, the playing juicy and warm. The
first danced piece was Front Line, Oguike's vivid setting of a Shostakovich
string quartet. The concert showed how broad Oguike's appeal is: this
South Bank audience ranged from classical music specialists to cheering
teenagers.
The Independent
There
are moments in Oguike's collaboration with the Britten Sinfonia where
it is music rather than choreography that dominates. Not only do the Sinfonia
play on stage the entire time but they are clearly in the driving seat
during the programme's centrepiece, Tippett's Concerto for Double String
Orchestra.
It's
hard to imagine that even Oguike, who is famously intrepid in his musical
choices, would independently choose to choreograph this score. Tippett's
sound is so lush, so serene, that dance can have little argument with
it, and initially Oguike's armoury of gentle, bouncing, folksy steps not
only look ineffectual but fake. Yet he starts to find his purchase on
the music during the second movement, a solo during which Nuno Silver
dreamily, secretly wraps the tendrils of Tippett's melody around himself.
And
by the third movement, Oguike looks totally convincing as the musical
and choreographic abundance that has been gathered up is scattered deliriously
over the stage, the dancers linking into chains and the whole dynamic
building to a gathering rush.
Confidently
as the work concludes, it couldn't survive without the framing drama of
the musicians on stage; however, the rest of the evening is completely
taken over by Oguike, with a revival of his cataclysmic signature piece
Front Line and a London premiere for Tiger Dancing, set to Steve Martland's
score and inspired by Blake's The Tyger.
For this,
his latest piece, Oguike resists all temptations towards the zoomorphic,
but instead invents a language of savagely eclectic exoticism in which
tiny geisha-style runs, high on the balls of the feet, are mixed with
atavistic Greek poses, and pouncing leaps. The effect is scintillating.
Oguike's eight dancers glitter like beasts, glimpsed through dark undergrowth,
and as they track each other in virtuoso flickers of dance the stage hums
with all the "fearful symmetry" of Blake's imagining.
The Guardian
Henri
Oguike is in no danger of losing his status as one of our most musically
astute choreographers. Joining forces with the Britten Sinfonia, his vibrant
young company drew a full house of music-lovers and dance fans to the
South Bank.
The
evening’s musical bent was evident from the start. Edward Gregson’s Stepping
Out is a four-minute rain of urgent strings. The Sinfonia delivered it
centre stage, most of the musicians on their feet swiftly sawing through
the lively little score.
This
brisk introduction paved the way for Front Line . Since its 2002 premiere
Oguike’s muscular sextet has become the company’s signature piece. Set
to Shostakovich’s String Quartet No 9 in E flat, the dance exhibits an
almost punitively assertive energy.
Oguike
offered a much sweeter vision of community in Tippett’s Concerto for Double
String Orchestra. Wearing casually elegant costumes of pale green and
white, the eight dancers looked set for a springtime lawn party. The Sinfonia’s
musicians, all in black, stood upstage to play the plangent score. The
dance’s blithe, vigorous opening passage was set to music both light yet
dense. Oguike’s ensemble strode and jumped, hopped sideways or formed
human chains.
The
middle section featured the solitary Nuno Silva. His body language and
open expression suggested a man at ease with himself, although a few unvoiced
uncertainties seemed to hang in the air. The music was mellow with a melancholy
undertow. Silva responded with a soft, lush power pitched perfectly between
passion and grace.
Choreographically
and musically the final third reprised the spirited lyricism of the first.
Altogether the work broke no new ground, and yet its simple eloquence
was like a throwback to the kind of modern dance traditions we see less
often these days.
The
programme ended with Tiger Dancing , a feral group piece that doesn’t
develop much beyond its initial, albeit strong, kitty-cat concept. Taken
as a whole, the bill amply demonstrated Oguike’s gift for crafting expansive
movement and his popular touch.
The Times
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