Alastair Macaulay reviews: London’s newest dance fest (some of it minor league)

London has a new dance season: the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival, eclectic and international, with choreography old (George Balanchine”s 1934 “Serenade”) and new, with some dancing barefoot, some in sneakers, and some on point. This festival began on March 12; it will end on April 8; it included the Ballet de Lyon performances of a vintage double bill of Merce Cunningham double bill, which I described last week, and it will include the Royal Ballet’s triple bill of three Balanchine one-act classics, which open this weekend. The festival is taking place in London venues on both sides of the Thames, from Stratford (Sadler’s Wells East) to Islington (two different auditoria at Sadler’s Wells), from Southwark (Tate Modern) to Covent Garden (three different parts of the Royal Opera House).

Its stylistic eclecticism makes it an ideal context for a premiere by the American choreographer Pam Tanowitz, who may well be the least predictable – often the oddest – choreographer in the world. For oddity, admittedly, the van Cleef and Arpels festival gave Tanowitz plenty of competition. Christian Rizzo (March 12-13, Lilian Baylis Theatre), French and sixty years old and performing alone for forty-five minutes, dismantled a packing case, piece by piece while dancing. Hagay Dreaming (March 13-15, Tate Modern), using Taiwanese traditions and modern technology (the lighting was miles more sophisticated than the dancing), was an exercise in mumbo-jumbo. Soa Ratsifandrihana (March 19-20, Lilian Baylis), a Franca-Malagasy dancer based in Brussels, danced a waffly solo that tried for patches of spontaneity without becoming interesting. Every country has its minor-league fringe dancers, but why are Van Cleef & Arpels bringing these very minor dance folk to London?

Tanowitz’s oddity is very different. She can take dancers with evident degrees of technical skill but give them phrases, structures, and spatial organisations that are disconcertingly peculiar, while the way she fits her choreography to music is often stranger yet. In a number of works over the last ten years, she has developed what I’ve called radical counterpoint, with the timing of dancing and music coming in very separately and yet subtly answering each other.

Under the Van Cleef & Arpels aegis, Tanowitz’s latest, “Neither Drums Nor Trumpets”, had its premiere at 1pm in Covent Garden’s Floral Hall, with the audience on four sides of the rectangular space but with the dancers occasionally above the dancers (on the first balcony) or behind them. Two Royal Ballet figures, Deirdre Chapman and Marcelino Sambé, stood on the sidelines like waiters (they even donned white aprons), and briefly joined in the dancing. Most of the dancing came from two different groups and a soloist, each costumed by Maile Okamura in patterned trousered outfits of different colours. One group was of ten young-adult barefoot student dancers from the Rambert Academy (dressed in pink-purple). The second group was of six of Tanowitz’s own regular dancers, also barefoot, in dappled green. The soloist was Victor Lozano (another longtime Tanowitz performer) wearing patterned orange clothes, plus silver sneakers.

In the programme, the music for “Neither Drums Nor Trumpets” is credited to Caroline Shaw and The Knights, but this omits two large sections of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. (Apparently, Tanowitz added them after the programmes were printed – but surely some slip should have been added to explain.) Some of the Beethoven seems to operate just as atmosphere or like folk music, but there are enchantingly felicitous details. For example, as the symphony’s portrayal of the countryside idyll reaches a long, concluding trill, Tanowitz has five of her dancers, in a row, stand and simply and slowly rotate or roll their heads. Who ever matched a musical trill with a head-roll before? Yet there’s a basking, rich quality to the head-roll that is richly right for the mixture of tension and leisure in Beethoven’s trill.

Tanowitz’s oddities in “Neither Drums Nor Trumpets” aren’t all so felicitous, but they are all arresting, disconcerting, refreshing. Those ten Rambert students sometimes performs multiple sequences in multiple directions at the same time. At other times, they process in single file (as they do, each tilts in the opposite direction from the one before them – left, right, left, right), building a simple movement phrase into a strange crescendo.

When you go over Tanowitz’s choices of movement in your mind after the performance, you realise she wins no prizes for movement innovation, and yet she keeps making you blink in surprise. That step really doesn’t go with this one, but the juxtaposition gets under your skin. Lozano, in those silver sneakers, leans his body right forwards and slowly ripples his arms and shoulders in a rich horizontal wave: it’s impossible to say what this has to do with anything else in “Neither Drums”, but it changes everything onstage and enlarges the feeling of the world onstage. Tanowitz’s oddity does us all good.

I must also praise, from earlier in the Van Cleef season, the double bill by the Trisha Brown Dance Company. Brown (1936-2017) was surely the most valuable of the post-Cunningham “Terpsichore in Sneakers” generation of experimentalists; the U.K. saw several seasons of her work from 1979 onwards. The March 12-13 double bill at Sadler’s Wells combined her “Work in Progress” (1985) with a 2023 work by the French choreographer Noé Soulier (b.1987). It was wonderful to see again Brown’s compositional wit in “Work in Progress”. Although Soulier, whose “In the Fall” was the programme’s first half, doesn’t choreograph with the same lightness of touch, he handles Brown’s style with variety and skill – keeping her company and her idiom alive.