Blue Rose/Chaconne/The Moor’s Pavane/Paseillo

Published Wednesday 30 April 2008 at 11:45 by Katie Colombus

Phoenix Dance Theatre claims to commission and create new work that explores the boundaries of contemporary dance through unexpected collaboration with other disciplines. And yet most of the chosen pieces for this mixed bill are clearly forcibly derived from straight theatre and classical music.

Blue Roses is a direct physical interpretation of Tennessee Williams’ reading of excerpts from The Glass Menagerie. It is stilted mime, closely monitoring the pace and intonation of Williams’ speech - the rhythm and musicality of his words as he vocalises his own creation, the movement mirroring the natural drops in heavy movements and falls, spins and deep plies matching the lull and force of the monologue.

Chaconne is a piece swept along by the melody, force and substance of Bach’s score, the dancer (Bradley Shelver) a slave to the music. Only those with a finer appreciation of Limon choreography - the musicality, the form, the intellect and aesthetics - will become fully immersed in watching this piece.

The Moor’s Pavane is again, based on a theatrical text - this time Othello. The choreography expresses the emotion, the motive, the drama and the spirituality of Shakespeare’s Othello, Desdemona, Iago and Emilia. The quartet move through a sequence of steps while dressed in floor length velvet gowns of reds and burnt oranges to a baroque Purcell score. Tiziana Fracchiolla in particular is a joy to watch, but only if you’re a fan of renaissance court dancing.

Wrapping up with Paseillo - the only pure dance piece of the evening - we see a Venetian street scene exploring the interaction of groups and couples, their tales of love, passion, revenge and jealousy. It’s a pity Phoenix deems it necessary to educate its audience with the historically relevant stuff, when more of the free-flowing type artistry of De Frutos’ Paseillo would have created a far more enjoyable - if slightly less historically important - evening of contemporary dance.