In these times of shrinking arts budgets, in steps high-end jewellery brand Van Cleef and Arpels to curate and sponsor an impressively wide-ranging festival of 15 performances across four weeks in London, called Dance Reflections (there have been editions in Hong Kong, Japan and the US too). Tonight’s opening show sets out the intention: to honour classics of 20th-century dance, and introduce current artists following in their slipstream.
Here, Working Title, from 1985, by the great postmodern choreographer Trisha Brown (who died in 2017) is paired with a recent piece from French choreographer Noé Soulier, made for Brown’s company. Soulier’s piece, In the Fall, is full of Trisha Brown-ness. It opens with the dancers in long, still poses, bodies making sharp V-shapes or finely tuned angles. They balance, they lean, they inevitably fall. They create perfect forms and yet at the same time they’re so human: all that impossible striving, all the failure, and the keeping-trying.
