Seven for a Secret

Rambert Dance Company

Seven for a Secret

I had wondered whilst looking at the program whether the three shows that The Rambert Dance Company were presenting at Sadler’s Wells were connected to each other, but the only way I could think of them as having any continuity is to think that the evening went from something very primal in RainForest, to infantile and innocent in Seven for a Secret, to adult and sexual in Elysian Fields at the end. It was a confusing display and I left not understanding what each piece was trying to achieve, other than to make some kind of statement about its individual style.

                RainForest I am afraid I didn’t much like. I found the music (and the movement) jarring; I felt more like I was amongst reversing vehicles in a building site than in a jungle. The feral movements of the dancer-animals around the silver floating balloons did not move me at all; I didn’t understand them and I gave up trying. My fault I’m sure.

                Seven for a secret, never to be told is inspired by the behaviour of children. It began with a sleeping child and the strange colours and shadows on the stage, as well as the continued use of the pillows in choreographed fights, made me feel like I was watching a dream. I liked the playful moments when simple things became a game, and then another game, and then the old game again; the dancers conveyed the spontaneity and energy with which children are able to have fun. As an adult it is quite a challenge to try to act childlike without being childish and there was something a little trite about the look of the piece: the boy scout neckerchiefs and the schoolgirl dresses, and like in RainForest, I found myself wondering what the point of the piece had been or whether I was missing some storyline.

                The final of the three pieces was Elysian Fields, based on work by Tennessee Williams. To go (in just a 20 minute interval) from the psyche of an infant into that the sultry darkness of the Deep South was actually rather a relief to me. The dancers sat in a ring on huge shadowy chairs – voyeuristic like we in the audience were, they read out Williams’s words in low southern accents (and some in level English tones) whilst others echoed and then danced them out. The mood was heavy, sexual and starved, the dancers moving around each other with a passionate violence and their moans and gasps were audible above the music. The line ‘she poured herself another drink’ changed the stage for me so that the circle in which they performed became the lip of a whisky glass in whose interior they had become trapped for their movements had a drunkenness to them. It is strange to hear the voices of a dancer; strange to allow them to communicate with more than just their bodies, but of the three Rambert acts I found this last the most provoking.