Dance: Rambert back with an ambitious triple bill

Dessert first! Prepare to lick your lips in anticipation – Rambert are bringing back Itzik Galili’s A Linha Curva, one of those sinuous-sensual company pieces that fits the dancers like a very close (and somewhat scanty) glove. The choreography oozes with sexy, flirty movement that looks so-o-o easy, until – back home, when nobody’s kooking – you try to emulate the hip-sway, the undulations, the sheer hot-to-trot style of the dancers. In a programme that features two new works, this one is a proven favourite wherever Rambert take it.

Last month, at the Lowry in Salford, Rambert gave the premiere of Symbiosis by Greek choreographer Andonis Foniadakis. In essence, this an abstract work although it’s possible to detect a human element to Foniadakas’s original concept. He has acknowledged this himself, saying, "Symbiosis is inspired by the energy created in cities each and every day as we try to exist in an era fuelled by digital technology. There is an urban pulse in the piece, in which people collide as they might on a crowded city street, but they adapt to their surroundings, collaborate and coexist.” Energy – how it builds, dissipates, transforms and destroys - is a recurring theme in the works that Foniadakis has made for companies world-wide, but he freely admits that the story of his home country remains a key influence and is on record saying:“Ever since I first heard about the financial crisis in Greece, all my work has had an uncertainty about it, that something’s not quite right. In my work this translates into a tense kind of energy, in the performers individually and as a group”.

The new score for Symbiosis – by BAFTA and Ivor Novello Award-nominated composer Ilan Eshkeri – simply drives the dancers like some turbo-charged force that exists beyond flesh and blood limits: the result is one of those intensely physical performances where the precision and discipline of the dancers makes your own pulse race, as you watch.

It’s probably a reflection of the long-standing relationship that Rambert has with Edinburgh - when the company re-launched itself in the mid-1990’s, it was at the Festival Theatre – that encourages the current artistic director, Mark Baldwin, to bring important premieres to this venue. Tonight’s triple bill has one such premiere, choreographed by Ben Duke whose radical style has made Lost Dog, the dance/physical theatre company he co-founded in 2004, one of the most mettlesome and exciting independent companies in the UK.

The last time we saw Ben Duke in Edinburgh, he was playing God. And Lucifer. Adam and Eve as well, in a solo tour de force that took the Fringe of 2015 by storm, and in subsequent months saw Duke being nominated for and winning seriously covetable awards. The show was Paradise Lost (lies unopened beside me) and it confirmed Duke as one of those maverick talents who – by not fitting exclusively into any of the conventional creative niches, such as director or choreographer or performer – brings a distinctly left-field energy and perception to whatever project he has in hand. Edinburgh will again discover that quirky originality when Rambert Dance arrives on-stage at the.

Last time, in his Fringe show, Duke drew inspiration from Milton’s epic poem. This time, he’s looked around at his own time, at what’s going on in world politics and at the unnerving events that are, as it were, happening on his own doorstep and he’s made Goat. That’s ‘goat’ as in scapegoat - his own working definition echoes the biblical concept of “the literal scapegoat being the animal to which you attach the sins of the city and drive out.” Duke actually lives in rural Sussex, but earlier this year, just as he was beginning his six week devising stint at Rambert’s South Bank headquarters, London was in the grip of terror attacks. The maelstrom of emotions that were running high in the city got under the skin of his imagination and made his thoughts itch with deeply concerning questions.

He started reflecting on what happens when the everyday comings and goings of a cosmopolitan city are suddenly compromised – you could say held hostage – by acts of intense violence. For Duke, sitting on the London Tube, or walking along roads that you couldn’t automatically assume were safe that day, the issue came down to one of anger. His ideas started to coalesce around that feeling of being angry. The why of it, and - perhaps harder to pinpoint - the ‘who’ of it... the hint, perhaps, of a questioning that implicates us, as well as the perpetrator.

Meanwhile, he’d been drawn to a piece of music, or rather to a very specific rendition of a song. Watching the YouTube clip of Nina Simone at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival, when she sang Feelings, had stirred a conflict of responses that Duke later described as “ a sense of not quite being comfortable but fascinated by a feeling that you should not be watching this.” Walking into the studio, making his first connections with the dancers Duke was wondering just how he could incorporate all of this material – Simone’s music, her spirit, her social awareness – into a piece of choreography that also channelled effects of violence and anger on today’s artists.

You can gain an insight into the challenges Duke set himself by reading the back-stage diary he kept during his time at Rambert. A train journey up to London finds him pre-occupied with the ramifications of Brexit, the General Election, the terror attacks and wondering what he was contributing to this “divided island”. He writes, at one point, “I think art is the opposite of terrorism. And that means the more frequent and violent the terrorism is, the better the art has to become.”

You could say that Goat is Duke wearing his art, and his heart, on his sleeve. Keeping faith with Nina Simone as an inspiration, several of her songs will be sung live, on-stage, by Nia Lynn with a band led by musical director and piano player Yshani Perinpanayagam. The rehearsal buzz is that Duke has woven dark humour and deeply affecting moments together into a Goat that is trying to say something meaningful and sincere about the pleasure and pain of performing in the face of troubling times. Duke’s diary has a final entry that reads: “ As I watch the final run through I feel tearful and elated. That is either because I’ve had too much caffeine and not enough sleep or because this piece has something. I will have to wait until opening night to know for sure.”

That opening night is tonight at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

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