The 2005 Dance Umbrella season kicked off last week with the London debut of the Forsythe Company, created after William Forsythe’s longstanding and successful collaboration with Frankfurt Ballet ended for debatable administrative and artistic reasons. The event attracted an audience of electrified Forsythe diehards, but was not memorable.
The oddly mixed programme started with two recent (2002) and complementary creations, The Room As It Was and N.N.N.N. Each work focused on an in-depth study of how movements, be they large or minute, are generated in one body and can then transfer, with variations, repetitions, additions and reactions, to other bodies. The resulting action was frenziedly seamless. There were darker tones in the first work, whereas the second veered towards slapstick comedy from a spirited, all-male quartet.
Set against a stark backcloth and punctuated by intentionally audible breathing, neither work came across as particularly provocative or innovative.
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