Rambert is a dance company currently firing on all cylinders, and choreographer-director Ben Duke has come up with some gems in recent years, so this double bill of the two works Duke has made for Rambert should be a corker, but it doesn’t completely fly.
The older of the two pieces, Goat, was made in 2017. The first day of creation came in the aftermath of the London Bridge terror attacks, a mile away from Rambert’s studio, just as Duke was planning to take Nina Simone’s advice that an artist’s duty is to reflect the times. There were no doubt a lot of reactions and ideas swirling around in the studio as they made it, and there are still too many ideas swirling around on stage now.
“Ask yourself, what can I do? Because we have to do something,” one dancer states early on in the show. Impotence is the ultimate theme: what can we do? (And six years on, you can take your pick of the world’s tragedies to feel impotent about.) As if contemporary dance is going to solve our problems. They are quick to deflate any such highfalutin notion. One character is a TV reporter. “What is your dance about?” she asks a man contorting his body. “A metaphorical hunger for expansion,” he says. “To be honest, I wouldn’t have got that,” she deadpans.
There are dances of “alienation” and “fate” and this is a company of incredible movers, they are doing it seriously, and impressively, but also pointing at their own absurdity. There are also brief moments of joyful dancing to the music of Simone (sung by Sheree DuBois), which can distract us into forgetting – one of the things we do turn to art for – when sober characters suddenly become freely moving bodies, in oozing movement.
With the TV anchor poking her nose in, demanding opinion and reaction, Goat is a comment on the tyranny of 24-hour news, using live camera on stage as a theatrical device (something Duke has finessed in later works). It’s also about the value, or lack of value, of human life (there’s a human sacrifice, because goats used to be sacrificed but animal rights protesters stopped that). There’s a lot that’s profound here, but it loses its way.
Cerberus, made in 2022, is more successful because it only really has one idea, essentially that there’s no turning back, we are all walking a certain path towards death. And Duke somehow makes that bleak fact entertaining.
The path is a visible one, stage right to stage left: when dancer Aishwarya Raut exits into the wings, that’s the end of her. The brilliant drummer Romarna Campbell propels the dancers forward. “Stop drumming!” exhorts one, but she can’t, and as long as there’s a pulse, the march continues. Visually the repetition has cumulative power (with dancers breaking off into arresting solos), but it’s all undercut by the self-aware meta-narrative, featuring a stagehand who finds himself in the middle of this scene, telling us Raut is just backstage getting changed. Isn’t she? The confusion and disbelief of grief is deftly sewn in, but it’s wryly funny, too.
• At Sadler’s Wells, London, until 25 November, then touring from March to April
