Festival Dance

Rain

Playhouse

Mary Brennan

four stars

AFTERWARDS, trooping out into a dark night with flickers of drizzle in the air, the contrast with Rain is keenly felt. On-stage, the semi-circular beaded curtain – designed by Jan Versweyveld – had glowed with colour-washes that shifted from pale rose gold through violet into dramatic purple before fading back into a sunny disposition. Dries van Noten’s costuming also changed hues, his little chiffon frocks floating in a palette of pinks that deepened towards magenta mid-way through the piece, before waning into ivory, silver grey, lemon. Nothing in this exquisite mise-en-scene suggested minimalism, and yet that is the term that has become something of an essential epithet for Steve Reich’s music, and for the choreography that Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker creates in response to it.

However, listen closely – as De Keersmaeker certainly has – to Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and what initially seems stringently crafted simplicity swells with burgeoning harmonics, adding in rich textures from clarinets, marimba and xylophone that carry an invitation to dance for joy. Which is exactly what De Keersmaeker’s own company, Rosas, does in Rain. Three men and seven women ebb and flow across the stage in meticulously structured patternings – sometimes looping and spiraling as they run, leap balletically or skip playfully, sometimes forming straight lines, where arms swing upwards with a ritual-rhythmic synchronicity. Geometry is the mapping tactic in De Keersmaeker’s choreography, but as her dancers travel across the space, other constructs come to mind: birds flocking and wheeling along shared pathways or iron filings lured into formations by a magnetic force. The truly remarkable Rosas dancers never flag, nor falter, during the 70 minutes of perpetual motion, buoyant humanity bringing unexpected emotional depths to Rain’s minimalist components.