Touching, eclectic and exhilarating: Rambert Dance is in great shape

Rambert ages elegantly: it might just rank as the world’s oldest company devoted to modern dance (whatever that term might mean nowadays), but as it approaches its centenary, it’s still in great shape. Lean and hungry, open-minded and light-footed, it’s been lucky over the past 40 years to have enjoyed a stable succession of excellent artistic directors – Richard Alston, Christopher Bruce, Mark Baldwin and now the French-American Benoit Swan Pouffer – as well as policies that have healthily prevented it from becoming fixated on one choreographer or aesthetic. It keeps moving.

The current ensemble of 17 dancers makes a crack team, offering a broad range of body types and plenty of strong, fearless personalities. The triple bill they are presenting on the spring tour (finishing in Brighton at the end of this month) is typically eclectic in tone and idiom and they execute it with exhilarating panache: you feel that you could throw them anything and they’d run with it.

Imre and Marne van Opstal’s Eye Candy seemed to me a meditation on animation –how the limp and robotic, the marionette, the avatar and the corpse, can be stimulated into human life. With the cast body-stocking naked, vulnerability, fragility and exposure are evoked: at the climax comes the haunting image of a woman standing defiantly upright but touchingly insecure on a man’s hunched back. Alonzo King’s Following the Subtle Current Upstream is a more conventional suite, flecked with references to Balanchine and smartly crafted: it doesn’t quite rise to its stated goal of providing joy, though it is danced with mounting energy.

In the evening’s centre comes Ben Duke’s whimsical ‘meta-comedy’ Cerberus. There’s a lot of spoken dialogue here, handled with aplomb by Antonello Sangirardi and Alex Soulliere, but not much in the way of dancing – the premise being that a member of Rambert (Aishwarya Raut) has gone missing and is presumed dead, but is perhaps only lurking in her dressing room.