Chroma/The Four Temperaments/DGV

Published Thursday 23 November 2006 at 15:05 by Katie Phillips

Is it me or is everyone obsessed with James Bond at the moment? Even this new, chaotic (often confused) score, commissioned for Wayne McGregor’s Chroma by Joby Talbot and the White Stripes echoes the brassy, seething, brooding of a Bond soundtrack. It’s a stark contradiction to the ballet’s preface - a write up by McGregor talking about things like “the ‘essential’ space, which seems to reduce elements to make visible the invisible.” Such comments had the pyjama folders of the ballet world quivering in their plush velour seats and the contemporary minimalists positively salivating.

Despite the seemingly bizarre crossover, McGregor has managed to lasso and reign in the finer and more enjoyable aspects of both modern and traditional ballet fare - visual, visceral, architectural and philosophical - in, at best, a lyrical, beautiful and bewitching avante garde study of sinuous and frenetic movement, geometrical shapes, spasming bodies and elongated limbs.

Dressed in flesh coloured underwear creations designed by Moritz Junge, dancers wrap around one another, their heads jutting outwards like birds pecking at the air, then unfolding to dive and ripple like mermaids. Fashioning legs into diamond shapes, or firing out aggressive, forceful bouts of movement like gymnasts, they reach outwards before subverting such spatial tasks and folding back into themselves or becoming intent on following predetermined pathways in a search for their Chroma - the purity of colour, and freedom from white or grey.

Rather than inhuman minimalism, there is something something wilting and awkward, sad, broken and poignant in the dancer’s movements. They shine with enigmatic beauty, Steven McRae and Alina Cojocaru carrying the torch.

Christopher Weeldon’s DGV (Danse a Grande Vitesse) manages to successfully evoke the fresh, chugging, exhilarating score on which it is based - Michael Nyman’s MGV (Musique a Grande Vitesse), a piece created for the inauguration of the TGV French train line. Tightly packed commuters bob side to side and figures jump up to wave goodbye to departing passengers before Darcey Bussell is carried on stage in an impressive lift designed to see her as a bird, inkeeping with numerous other flight line images. The stage is busy and rhythmical the dancers jubilant and brisk.

Dancers weave in single file and spill out of a line with arching arms in canon - which, although bordering on choreographic cliche is actually very effective. Jean Marc Puissant’s remarkable stage design houses the piece perfectly.