All That Jazz

Published Thursday 28 February 2008 at 15:15 by Richard Edmonds

David Bintley’s jazz inspired triple bill is vital, intelligent and richly entertaining.

Bintley moves comfortably within themes inspired by both Shakespeare and classical legend, interpreting familiar tropes of violence, seduction and love through musical themes ranging from Duke Ellington to Dave Brubeck and Colin Towns. And the audience loved it.

Here is a choreographer who can move effortlessly from the demands of dancing a Thomas Hardy novel to the abstract whiplash extremities which lie within the speed of a set of Brubeck riffs.

Obviously the dancers trust their choreographer and it showed. Bintley’s endless invention was inspirational both to them and us, and I shall long remember Kosuke Yamamoto’s swift, airborne solo in the Take Five opening sequence.

Myth and legend are wide open for dance expressionism - Stravinsky worked through it successfully when he brought his version of Apollo and the Muses to the dance stage, but Bintley opens up the theme introducing curious creatures who advance downstage from the more interesting areas of hell as Iain Mackay’s Orpheus (soon, alas, to leave a burgeoning career with BRB for Spain and a privately-funded ballet company) approaches his doom-laden end.

Bintley calls his female fiends “Moisturisers”, but with their blowsy coiffures and louche, strolling gait, they resemble honky-tonk women and make hell more intriguing than (as a former altar boy) I had previously thought possible.

As regards the end of Orpheus, the climax was misty. In Bintley’s interpretation, our boy seemed to survive intact and kept his head. Excellent character work once more from Tyrone Singleton (here dancing Aristaeus - a kind of Pluto) .

The Shakespeare Suite takes certain Shakespeare characters as its raw material. Bintley guys (among others) Macbeth, Othello (Singleton again), Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. The cast danced up a storm and Valentin Olovyannikov scored a palpable hit as a particularly ingratiating Richard of Gloucester dancing without a hump, but slithering about with a limp. I scarcely noticed Lady Anne, but that’s a risk you take I suppose when partnering monstrous villainy.