Rambert, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

Mary Brennan

FOUR STARS

Emotions run deep, and dark, throughout this triple bill, one of the strongest that Rambert has staged in recent times. Brooding intensity reaches out right from the opening growl of the tubas in Dark Arteries, choreographed by Mark Baldwin to a thrillingly nuanced brass band score by Gavin Higgins – in Edinburgh, this complex score was played live by Whitburn Band with a finesse and vigour that captured the spirit of both music and dance.

Although the original inspiration for the piece came from the 1984 Miners’ Strike, there’s more to it than retro-agitprop: it’s a far-reaching triptych about the dynamics of a community’s identity before and after industrial strife. Against the initial clatter and thrum of Higgins’s score, we see a line of women in long full skirts slowly winding across the stage – elegant figures, not workaday miners’ wives, they seem emblematic of both the dignity of labour and the yen for beauty that led colliery men to form brass bands and make music. Percussive aggression heralds the onset of picket-line clashes full of bodies in conflict before the final mood sends brassy dissonances melting into wistful melodies and dancers in unitards filter into ensembles, their solos and duets stretching out in arcs of airy, graceful strength. It’s as compelling as it is challenging: a remarkable achievement by everyone involved.

Didy Veldman’s The 3 Dancers also emerges from a complicated back-story, a real-life relationship triangle depicted in Picasso’s painting that she brings to life with a trio of white-clad dancers counterpointed by a similar threesome of one woman, two men, all in black. Elena Kats Chernin’s music resonates with edgy tensions, huge silvery-reflective shards slice down alarmingly into the tightly defined area of action, the movement twines with power plays, some hostile, some manipulative, as partners change and go.

Kim Brandstrup’s wrenchingly affecting Transfigured Night (to Schoenberg’s music) sees a couple – danced by Simone Damberg-Wurtz and Miguel Altunaga – negotiate the fall-out from her infidelity, their fragmentation and lingering affections made all the more poignant by Brandstrup’s milling crowd of shadowy observers who constantly pair off in lyric togetherness. If this tremendous triple bill didn’t exist, you’d want to invent it!