Two ambitious halves, danced with total commitment.
“When words fail, movement and touch take over” is the premise offered for Blue/Glas, National Dance Company Wales’s London double bill. Its title is drawn from the colour and everything that blue is asked to carry, from melancholy to moving water and bodies. It’s an ambitious idea for an opening statement, and for much of the evening the company’s dancers make good on it, rising to meet even the moments where the choreography asks less of them than they clearly have to give. What the programme doesn’t quite manage is landing that idea as fully as it reaches for it.
The bill opens with Theo Clinkard’s Ordinary Courage, first staged in 2012 and now returning at close to an hour in length. Six dancers move through loosely coordinated, colour-clashing, oversized shirts and mismatched trousers. Jackets shed early in the piece are looped back on by its close, in a study of grief set against Bach and Scarlatti and punctuated by long stretches of near-silence. The intention appears to be to trace the uneven terrain of loss and the way it circles back on itself. It struggles with duration; what should be devastating in the first twenty minutes has, by the fiftieth, softened into merely long. Even so, the dancers never let up, holding the emotional register of the piece with a steadiness that carries it further than the choreography alone would manage.
Untamed, Alesandra Seutin’s new work and the second half of the programme, is where the evening finds its nerve. At thirty minutes, with matching numbered vests and shorts and a soundscape built from traditional Welsh instruments and voice that begins as a single crackle and builds toward controlled noise, the piece has the courage of its own brevity. Where Ordinary Courage explains itself, Untamed simply runs, structurally as much as literally, chasing an idea of flight and rebirth, and it is here that the company’s range is on fullest display. Alys Davies is the standout of the night, her commitment so total it borders on unnerving (in the best possible way), and Sonny Connor-Bell matches her intensity beat for beat, pulling the rest of the ensemble up to a standard they spend the piece chasing.
As a pairing, the two works do not so much speak to one another as occupy adjacent rooms, which is where the title’s ambition comes up short. Blue/Glas wants old grief and new momentum, silence and noise, held together under one colour and one idea of moving as one, but in the room it plays as two distinct offerings that happen to share dancers rather than a single throughline. That gap between concept and execution is a fair price, though, for a programme this generous with its dancers, who move throughout with precision and commitment that make the evening worth the ticket regardless. If Pick-Up’s first curated statement doesn’t quite unify its halves, it leaves no doubt about the calibre of the company he now leads, and on this evidence, whatever he asks of them next is worth turning up for.
Blue/Glas’ run at Sadler’s Wells East, London is concluding tonight.