La La La Human Steps

Published Friday 1 February 2008 at 12:05 by Gavin Roebuck

Founded in 1980, this company has regularly toured the world becoming recognised for the unique choreographic language it has developed.

Choreographic complexity, the intertwining of, musical and cinematic strands and the alteration of balletic structures are among the elements used. With Amjad, founder and artistic director of La La La Human Steps, Edouard Lock, draws on the most famous ballets, Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty.

At the back of the stage in almost total darkness, a quartet of piano, cello and violins play a score by Gavin Bryars, who brutally adapts and rearranges Tchaikovsky’s original scores.

Lock takes classical ballet and gives it a frenetic twist in his choreography that is startling, and at times repetitive as well as exhilarating. With a projected film montage of forests and pearls his company, of nine dancers five women and four men, perform adapted classical movements at twice the normal speed.

Sleekly dressed in black, the women in leotard and tights and the men in suits, are starkly lit by one or two white lights only. The packed theatre enjoyed seeing this display of classical technique from a new deconstructed perspective.

In solo moments, groups, trios and duets, all the dancers display a fine training as they explore the abstract choreography influenced by the classical narrative genre. This sophisticated piece is a marriage of tradition and modernity.