Nederlands Dans Theater, Sadler’s Wells review — superb technique, questionable choreography

Nederlands Dans Theater’s dancers have always been premier-league performers, able to make silk purses from the most unpromising material. Their current run at Sadler’s Wells in London, the first visit by the company since 2018, is the usual frustrating mix of superb technique, slick staging and variable choreography.

The evening got off to a dismal start with La Ruta by Argentine dancemaker Gabriela Carrizo, alumna of Alain Platel’s Ballets C de la B and artistic director of Brussels-based outfit Peeping Tom; she specialises in nightmarish, non-linear narratives.

The incessant vignettes of La Ruta take place beside a busy road. The simple set — a bus shelter, four boulders, a forklift truck — is lit with Hopperish intensity by Tom Visser. The lighting wizard’s clever evocation of passing traffic and a smoke machine on overtime create a moody and mysterious mise-en-scène which is let down by Carrizo’s thin, derivative material.

The pratfalls and ugly, ragdoll duets are heavily reliant on the performers’ hyper-articulate physiques and bear scant relation to the distorted snatches of Shostakovich quoted in the soundtrack (the music gets its own dramaturge). A woman knots her limbs into wince-inducing contortions, another tears the bleeding heart from a dead deer and wedges it into the shirtfront of her companion before a passing maniac brains the entire cast with one of the boulders.

This kind of David Lynch tanztheater has been done with infinitely more skill and wit by Mark Bruce in thrifty noir dance dramas such as Dracula and last year’s Phantoms. Sadly Arts Council England (which seldom seems to prioritise artistic excellence) has axed his core funding. Perhaps NDT should give him a call?

Second up was 2008’s Gods and Dogs by NDT’s former director Jiří Kylián, set to Beethoven’s String Quartet Op 18 and led by the steely and impressive Surimu Fukushi, but the evening’s main event was the premiere of a new work by Crystal Pite.

Way back in 1988 David Bintley created his popular one-act Still Life at the Penguin Cafe which sugar-coated a serious message about extinction. Pite and Complicité’s Simon McBurney mine the same seam with 2022’s Figures in Extinction [1.0], the first instalment of a triptych on the climate crisis.

A voiceover intones John Berger’s 1977 essay “Why Look at Animals?” and intertitles spell out the names of the vanished creatures — Bachman’s warbler, the northern white rhinoceros — which are brought to life by Pite’s expressive, inventive choreography and some gorgeous stagecraft. The majestic Pyrenean ibex is conjured by Luca-Andrea Tessarini wearing curling horns that extend his arms to a monstrous length.

The South Selkirk caribou herd browse convincingly from wing to wing (yet further proof of Pite’s mastery of a large ensemble) and Toby Sedgwick’s five-man cheetah puppet is brilliantly done. Meanwhile Jon Bond’s shape-shifting, sharp-suited climate change denier earned easy laughs by lip-syncing a mindless rant about his 500hp Mustang and freedom of choice.

The earnest message pretty much guarantees a gong but telling your audience that man-made extinction is A Bad Thing felt a lot like preaching to the choir. Thought-provoking, yes — but only if you’d never actually thought about it.

★★★☆☆

To April 22, sadlerswells.com