It seems that Terpsichore, the Greek Muse for dance, has cast a spell to make Rambert and Ben Duke a match made in her heaven. This fanciful allusion has relevance since Duke often turns to Greek mythology for inspiration: as, for example, in last year’s award-winning Ruination (the story of Medea) and in this programme’s opener, Cerberus (Orpheus and Eurydice). Both this and the second part, Goat, had been performed by Rambert before in separate triple bills (respectively 2022 and 2017) and it was a clever move to repackage them together in an all-Duke programme, hung together on the overarching title of Death Trap, since mortality is their common theme.
Duke punctuates choreography with comedy or, perhaps it’s the other way around since both these works have more spoken text than dance. He also merges humour and pathos in such close alignment that you are liable to be laughing at one moment and then feeling guilty for doing so, the next. His humour has a Marmite touch: I found myself serially laughing out loud, but my companion could hardly raise a smile. The comedy comes both in the big bang of emphatic punch lines and the whispered secrets of subtle puns.
Cerberus should make us all look at the stage rather differently! It began with Aishwarya Raut – Duke’s version of Eurydice (but all his characters retain their own first names) – dragging a long, thick rope from stage right to stage left before disappearing, leaving only her rope behind. In a comical voiceover prelude, we were told that stage right represented birth and passing over to the other side was death. Like Raut, Antonello Sangirardi and Alex Soulliere reprised their roles from 2022, representing a narrator/translator duo and they carried – very successfully – the bulk of the work’s considerable humour as Sangirardi first attempted a halting eulogy (in Italian) for his lost friend and then tried every means possible to stop a succession of other people from entering Hades via the wings at stage left.
A change from the original performance saw Clare Edwards on stage throughout adding an extra layer of translation through her BSL interpretation but going well beyond that duty to add her own comedy expressions to the process. Live musical support came from Romarna Campbell (drums), Caroline Jaya-Ratnam (vocals) and Dave Manington (guitar).
The rest of the Rambert ensemble performed in a cyclical conveyor belt, moving ceaselessly across the stage in the passage from birth to death, the last process of which saw them tied together on an apparently endless length of rope, each moving towards Hades in a different manner (crawling, turning, backwards etc); the end-of-the-pier theatricality emphasised by the ruched pink curtains as a backdrop. Sangirardi, now in the mantle of Orpheus, then brought his own rope to make the descent into Hades to find Aishwarya. Has dance become a matter of life and death? Or did Aishwarya have her feet up in the dressing room? Of course, we know the answer; stage left is just a passageway into the wings and not a portal to Hades; but, it’s tempting to buy into Duke’s tragi-comic analogy to myth and mortality.
Goat was inspired by the music and spirit of Nina Simone with a live onstage band (the same musicians as in Cerberus but with Jaya-Ratnam moving to the piano and Manington to Bass) supporting the jazz vocals of Sheree DuBois, evocatively covering Simone’s classics Feeling Good and I Got Life and the more ubiquitous My Way and Feelings. Goat also engages a central speaking role through the device of a TV interviewer and her ‘hot’ but put-upon cameraman (Joseph Kudra) making a live broadcast from a ‘ritual’. Miguel Altunaga memorably played the interviewer’s role back in 2017 and it has now been passed on to Angélique Blasco who handled the mix of comical insensitivity, daft questioning, befuddled consternation and quiet heroism with excellent intonation and delivery, establishing a benchmark for comedy creation in dance theatre. Her thoughtless interrogation of Jonathan Wade (as the anxious chosen one waiting for his death dance) was achingly hilarious.
The bursts of dance in Goat are excellent whether as an organic cluster of performers following individual strands in a collective bloom or in Wade’s agonising solo of being danced to death. It is arguable whether the dance content is enough over the two works and I felt the slow, saccharine sentimentality of the closing sequences of Goat to be too long and ponderous.
The idea of The Rite of Spring taking place in something akin to a village hall (identified by a raised stage and rigid plastic chairs) suggested the Tanztheater of Pina Bausch (the hall perhaps referencing the similar staging of her seminal work, Kontakthof). The mix of spoken text, humour, pathos, song and dance is now familiar territory in contemporary dance theatre but it is rarely done so well.
