New Theatre, Cardiff
Wed 9 June
After watching this extremely promising adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, you start to wonder why ballet is conventionally associated with pink frilly tutus and six-year-old girls. Indeed, there has never been a more fitting subject for this form of dance than the decadent sitting rooms of eighteenth-century high society.
The subtle development of plot through movement provides a perfect representational foundation for themes of letters and secrecy to flourish. Taking an epistolary novel as their inspiration, the wordless dancers spin a glamorous web of concealment. Aiding this, the constraints integral to this disciplined dance-form truly mirror the rigidity of the society they portray.
Yet there is something terribly unfulfilled about this work. For some seemingly illogical reason, the company have decided to set this piece to Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Hence, as the work springs into action, it is not only limited by plot, but also by the development and musical ornamentation of the movements.
Perhaps it is partly this constraint that drives the company to a horrifying lack of subtlety, rendering the tale’s deliciously mischievous and sensual themes simply loathsome. With lewd choreography that integrates thrusting and cunnilingus alongside pirouettes and arabesques, this adaptation allows the dancers to transcend first and second positions and, quite frankly, reinvent the Karma Sutra.
You have to credit this company for their ambition, yet this reach is ultimately their downfall. What promises to be an insightful and appropriate performance is reduced to a chaotic and irritating tangle of dancers and ideas.