Muscular dance, vapid video: Aisha and Abhaya by Rambert
Aisha and Abhaya
Rambert
Linbury Theatre
Side Stalls AA25, comp
23 January 2020
ROH page
Aisha and Abhaya had a troubled path to the stage, pulled from its original premiere due to the serious illness of co-creator Kibwe Tavares. Thankfully he recovered – but this long and interrupted gestation is evident in the final work, where the many creative components more often pull away from each other than they beat together. None of this, however, undermines the thrill of seeing the phenomenal Rambert dancers in the intimate Linbury, and I can only fervently hope that the collaboration between Royal Ballet and Rambert continues, in any shape.
Of those disparate creative components, then, the muscular choreography of Sharon Eyal and its almost terrifying interpretation by Rambert is by far the most successful and most interesting. Given this, it is frustrating that in the way the work is described by all involved Eyal’s input seems secondary to Tavares’s. I gather Eyal is very shy, and there is undoubtedly a great deal more complexity in Tavares’s input of two short films, shot on location in Northern Ireland and involving motion capture and all of the accompanying shebang. But at risk of sounding either a fuddy-duddy or cynical naysayer or both, Aisha and Abhaya is to me a demonstration of a dance company being excellent at creating dance and insufficient when it comes to venturing into other artistic realms.
Eyal’s choreography is low-weighted but taught; it feels as though each dancer is using every muscle all the time, and I quaked under imagined pheromonal waves of pure strength and power billowing from the stage. It is exhilarating, and ideally made on the Rambert dancers – I can’t imagine another company performing it without in some way softening the essence of Eyal’s brutality. Credit for the overall effect must also go in some part to original music by Ori Lichtik and Gaika, on its own pretty generically grungy but an apposite setting for Eyal and her dancers to make their art.
What relation the dance has to the films around them, both those that frame Aisha and Abhaya and that form a backdrop, is pretty inscrutable. That’s certainly not a barrier when it comes to enjoying Eyal’s work; its integrity gives it a certain independence. Tavares’s films, however, are less confident. There are good things about them – they are certainly atmospheric, and create a story with considerable efficiency. But there is an unmistakeable film-school vibe to them: a self-awareness and slight pomposity, a definite self-indulgence, a failure to justify fully the attention (and cost) accorded them. It could be that film is harder than dance, at least in the context of a live dance work; or it could be that, in the long years separating the initiation of Aisha and Abhaya from its conclusion, Eyal moved to places where Tavares could not follow.
No comments yet.