Rambert Dance Company

Apollo Theatre, George Street.

The first performance by Rambert was in 1926, so 2001 brings the Rambert Dance Company's 75th Anniversary,and a special programme of new pieces and old favourites.

Unrest opens the show, a new piece commissioned for the anniversary show. It's a dance of deceptive simplicity, full of delicate, sudden movement. The music opens with juddering violin, juxtaposed with calm piano, as the dancers, dressed in chessboard black and white, describe plain and open movements, pushing the attention back to the music, as they dance with each other, themselves, their shadows and the ghostly reflections in the glistening floor.

The second piece, Sounding, interprets Giaccinto Scelsi's extraordinary Okanagon; a resonant construction of angry underwater noise. The dancers move across a vast space of smokey blue carved up by bars of orange light, their angular bodies forming glyphs in the dimness, spelling out a mysterious message from the depths.

The central performance, Symphony of Psalms, dates from the seventies, and seems at the outset just a few modernistic add-ons to a traditonal ballet, but its true contemporary nature emerges as the dance progresses, undermining tradition with the sinister untertone of gender roles and old hammer horror films. The men, grey cruciform figures in a joyless space backed by traditional rugs and bounded by significant chairs display their sparse and wounded love; the women, pale, transforming figures of colour and light, respond with muted, disturbing passion, transforming carnality into pure and religous love.

The final piece, detritus, goes back to the future for a rhythmic and vivid dance beneath, around, and to a vast industrial sculpture, performed to a pulsing ambient track, ending the night in a glistening array of colour and light, while the dancers twist, the samples mutter, and the sculpture quivers and bows above their head like a benevolent techno-god.

Jeremy Dennis 9/10/01