When artistic director Benoit Swan Pouffer arrived at Rambert in 2018, he wanted to create a company of unique dancers you couldn’t take your eyes off. On current evidence, he has succeeded. These performers are diverse in bodies and backgrounds, and each has their own wow factor. Like Aishwarya Raut, in one work so jarringly android-like you can just about see the zeroes and ones racing through her operating system; or the protean Jonathan Wade, a whirlwind of astonishing speed; or Musa Motha, an amputee who, with one leg and one crutch takes flight in a corkscrewing blur.
There are no duds in this triple bill, each work demanding something very different. Dutch brother and sister Imre and Marne van Opstal choreograph Eye Candy, an unsettling meditation on the fetishisation of the perfect human body. The dancers play robotic non-humans, dressed in nude suits with silicone breasts and six-packs. Their physical control is incredible, the facility to freeze any muscle at any moment; with their futile attempts at connection, it’s a pretty dystopian vision.
