Jasmin Vardimon is an Israeli choreographer who has been based in the UK for more than a decade. Her style is violently, often dangerously physical, and, at its best, fascinating to watch.
Dancers hurl each other around or dive across the floor, twisting and turning low over the stage. She uses this style to create powerful, often funny work, focusing on specific institutions.
The ironically named Park is about a group of people confined in a concrete playground on some horrible estate; Lullaby is set in a hospital.
Yesterday, wrongly billed as a new work, is a retrospective of ten years as founding choreographer of her company.
This anniversary actually arrived more than two years ago, and there have been many changes since I saw the work then, though the most impressive passages have been retained.
Vardimon uses a lot of technology in her pieces. Yesterday opens with Mafalda Deville standing on the upraised feet of a dancer lying on the floor.
She is holding a fishing rod from which a camera dangles. What she is filming – mainly us, the audience – appears on a giant screen behind her. There is a lot of strobe lighting, flashing backgrounds, roaring soundtrack, but she has managed to turn this compilation of “best of” bits into an engrossing whole.
Most impressive is an excerpt from Lullaby, which consists of a lecture on how to stamp out disease. Deville is a black virus, grabbing at her target while he hurls her violently around the stage in his fight to get rid of her.
In a long section from Park the dancers are blown this way and that by the wind from a fiercely-waved flag while its owner spouts inflammatory nonsense.
This leads to an extraordinary finale in which the cast whirl through a deep carpet of feathers.
Glueing a whole lot of bits and pieces together like this shouldn’t really work, but it does.
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