Youth is in the air. Ballet schools around the country are staging end-of-year performances; the bright young things of the National Youth Dance Theatre and of Ballet Central are on tour; and Royal Opera House launched its 2023 Next Generation festival last week with a performance by the Finnish National Ballet Youth Company.
They are strong dancers, and the work they perform feels distinctive too. In A Collection of Connections by the British-Finnish choreographer Kristian Lever, you can taste the tang of his influences – Crystal Pite and Hofesh Shechter among them – but there’s enough idiosyncrasy to give the work its own flavour.
Under Nuno Salsinha’s dramatic lighting, from an onstage collection of spotlights, and in autumnal costumes by Lever himself, the 11 dancers surge and contract, their relationships evolving as the music and mood changes. There’s a brilliant duet for two men where everyday expressions of anger and submission turn into movement, and a tender concluding section suggesting a couple who long to be with each other but are never quite in tune. Interesting.
The programme opens with Fragment, choreographed by Emrecan Taniş, a visceral depiction of anxiety in which tiny twitching and tapping gestures shared between two dancers become a terrifying picture of an overwhelming feeling. Over Glow by Jorma Elo, probably Finland’s best-known choreographer, is more expansive, but its sunny jumps and elegant lines are also broken by flexed, jerky moments, with hands that seem to be tingling and arms that carve patterns that disturb the surface classicism. The atmosphere changes too, as Mendelssohn gives way to Beethoven and a gesture of running in the air seems to represent a desperate need to cling on to life itself.
Over at Sadler’s Wells, while the uncomplicated 42nd Street fills the main stage, challenging choreography has moved online in two stylish additions to the digital stage as part of its Motion Picture series of new collaborations in film and dance. Alesandra Seutin’s 15-minute Air de Temps, created with film-maker Ben Williams, takes the dancers to Bargny in Senegal and reconnects them with the memories of their ancestors.
The soundtrack incorporates text written and spoken by Seutin herself, and the film is full of striking images, with occasional sections of powerful dance. It is beautiful to look at but frustratingly elusive, its themes overlain with travelogue images.
Botis Seva’s Inside the Blind Iris is more direct, conjuring surreal images that owe a debt to early Buñuel and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, to make a point about the soul-destroying monotony of repetitive work. Seva himself stars as a man prowling the corridors of an immense factory, trapped at every turn.
The 10-minute piece, made in collaboration with the Brazilian film-maker Douglas Bernardt and incorporating animation by Daniel Ferro, cleverly combines all the tricks of cinema – Seva floating like a puppet suspended on strings that we see being drawn, an endless climb up a stylised silhouette of stairs – with the repetitive moves of the Far From the Norm dancers to create an overwhelming sense of oppression.
Filmed mostly in black and white, the moment when Seva finally breaks out into the full colour of the modern world, accompanied by a surging soundtrack, is almost ridiculously uplifting; the conclusion surprising and enigmatic. It’s a thought-provoking piece that confirms the value of creating dance for film. It opens up worlds for dance – and opens up dance to the world.
Air de Temps and Inside the Blind Iris are free to view on Sadler’s Wells Digital Stage
