Snow had led to the cancellation of the Friday performance. On Saturday the Friday audience, together with the audience who booked for Saturday, still failed to make up a full house – a pity, as this was a quality show. The Dancer’s Cut was the first event of the splendid Dancin’ Oxford season sponsored by Oxford City Council, and a celebration of the company’s work over two decades, with a selection of highlights from those years.
I was surprised to find that the company consisted of only four dancers – two men and two women – as previously it has always featured seven or eight. This restricted what could actually be performed, but, on the plus side, enabled those dancers to show us how accomplished they are.
Jeyasingh is trained in the Indian classical style Bharata Natyam, and she has combined this with western contemporary dance and other dance languages to produce a unique hybrid. Her dancers stamp with turned out feet, fan their fingers into classical shapes, pause often with their arms held up like the branches of trees. But they also flow through movements in a manner clearly of the West.
First up was Transtep, featuring a long opening solo by Kamala Devan in which we moved well into the area of contemporary dance, with a free movement and high swung legs – extremely well danced. The extract from Exit No Exit, with a typically facile score by Michael Nyman, gave us only a glimpse of the full work, in which Jeyasingh had presented us with a world as it might look through the faceted eyes of a honey bee. Faultline came and went, bringing us to Flicker, again to Nyman, but this time greatly enhanced by skittering electronic sounds. This is one of the choreographer’s most complex works, and makes a fitting finale.
These highlights showed us Jeyasingh’s undoubted skill, but they also suffered from an unfortunate lack of variety. This is the fault of selection, not of ability.
David Bellan
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