The Stage

Henri Oguike Dance Company

Published Friday 2 February 2007 at 15:55 by Pat Ashworth

The impact of this extraordinary company on a large and over-excited audience of madly texting teenage girls in Leicester was to reduce them to awed silence during the performance and lift them to huge appreciation at the end.

It is the impossible things that Oguike’s dancers can do with their bodies that leaves one open-mouthed. From positions of being bent double, contorted, prone or supine on the floor, they perform sequences of complicated movement so rapidly and with such fluidity that it looks effortless.

Oguike’s thrilling signature piece, the sextet Front Line, is danced to Shostakovitvch, played live on stage by the Pavao Quartet. It is a whirlwind dance that interprets every bar of the music, and in a programme where everything is barefoot, this dance most of all is characterised by extensive heel work. Muscular dancing and the deliberate placing of the whole foot on the floor gives the piece an urgent intensity.

What a contrast with the solo piece, Expression Lines, danced to the Saharan blues of guitarist Ali Farka Toure. Oguike folds in and out of the shadows, drawn to a warm orange spotlight at floor level as if it were an energy source. Rarely is his whole body illuminated, which gives the piece an awesome sense of mystery.

Tiger Dancing, to a score by Steve Martland, is bright and quirky and animalesque, and the programme climaxes in the fiery Little Red, where the choreography is so brilliant that Vivaldi’s music seems even to reflect the dancers’ brain waves.