Breaking with convention

Dance is a difficult art, often taxing audiences as much as it does its super-fit practitioners. It is also enveloped in an elitist air—especially ballet, crafted from a combination of rare physical expertise, years of graft and, on the parts of both performer and spectator, detailed technical knowledge.

Films such as Black Swan and the new BBC4 series Agony & Ecstasy—a fly-on-the-wall look at English National Ballet—have alerted us to the travails of the dancing life. It can be punishing (although Black Swan pushes the abuse too far). To rise to the top, you must have something special; you must also be driven.

Yet it’s not necessarily all about sweat and insults. The British tradition, raised to world eminence at the Royal Ballet by the likes of great choreographers Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan, is in safe hands at present under Monica Mason, the company’s director since 2002. While keeping the classics polished, she has also refreshed the Royal’s repertoire.

Resident choreographer Wayne McGregor has a new work, Ballo Della Regina, opening on 13th May, alongside Danse à Grande Vitesse, a revival by former Royal dancer Christopher Wheeldon. In the past, both men have brought to the Royal dynamic shows with zeitgeisty-sounding titles such as Chroma and Electric Counterpoint, performed by some of the world’s most astutely trained dancers: intricately designed, exquisitely delivered. People pay very good money to see them.

At Sadler’s Wells, the aesthetic is different. The Islington venue—there have been six theatres at the top of Rosebery Avenue since 1683—is Britain’s leading contemporary dance house. It’s an innovative producing theatre as well as a traditional receiving one, with a portfolio that includes choreographers Akram Khan and Russell Maliphant, and the lavishly gifted ex-ballerina Sylvie Guillem. Their mission is to create pieces that are as accessible as a new film or television drama.

What this means, to some extent, is demystifying dance: using a challenging range of scores, from baroque to electronica, embracing every style from flamenco to hip-hop, and mixing classical ballet with more bracing contemporary movement—some of it improvised, angular, abrupt and inelegant. Getting this work seen is also helped by matching prices to the straitened budget of any dance enthusiast or teenager keen to experience something other than a bop in the disco: 150 tickets priced at £10 are available for every Sadler’s Wells performance.

One of its big successes has been the Breakin’ Convention festival, a spring bank holiday carnival of hip-hop which began in 2004. This year’s Breakin’ Convention, opening on 30th April, will feature dancing from Chicago, Uganda, Japan and Britain. Every year, scores of teenagers descend on Sadler’s Wells for three days, more than halving the average age of those attending the theatre’s normal shows. The jamboree sends out a clear message: dance is within reach of anyone who likes to move, whether it’s jiving in your bedroom, breakdancing in the street—or even practising the famous five basic positions of ballet.

Alistair Spalding has been the Wells’s artistic director since 2004. As keen on street-shimmying as he is on cutting-edge choreography, he’s a quietly-spoken dance entrepreneur whose broad taste has turned the Wells into one of London’s buzziest, most youth-friendly theatres. Along with developing Breakin’ Convention, he’s been able to woo, among others, Maliphant, Khan and Guillem to the venue with a promise of top working conditions.

“I offered them all state-of-the-art rehearsal studios,” Spalding explains. “The spaces had lain fallow in the theatre since the late 1990s. I also asked them to become Sadler’s Wells associate artists. The role is unpaid but if ideas take wing, we’ll very likely turn them into shows.”

This is how recent work by choreographer Matthew Bourne, also a Wells associate, came into being. His massively popular all-male Swan Lake was a hit before it arrived at the Wells but his Edward Scissor-hands and Cinderella, now embedded in the Wells’s home and touring repertoires, were a direct result of Spalding’s open-ended policy to work in progress.

But landing Sylvie Guillem was a special coup. Once a superstar at the Paris Ballet, then briefly at the Royal, Guillem is an extraordinary dancer—her body, as the Guardian’s Judith Mackrell has memorably noted, is one of “fluky perfection.” Now in her mid-forties, she wanted to show that she could make the high-wire transition from ballet to contemporary dance.

In two shows, Maliphant’s PUSH (2005), starring Guillem and Maliphant and, a year later, Khan’s quirky Sacred Monsters, Guillem proved she could make that transition with consummate artistry. Partnering Khan, she was coquettish, playful and unbelievably supple. In PUSH, that suppleness produced a form of kinetic sculpture I’d not seen before in a dancer. In both sold-out shows, she was like liquid gold.

In what will surely be the highlight of the year at Sadler’s Wells, Guillem returns in early July with a new evening of work. It has no title yet, but the choreographers commissioned—William Forsythe (American, working in Germany), Mats Ek (from Sweden) and Jirí Kylián (Czech-born though working mainly in Holland)—have been the bellwethers of contemporary dance for three decades and more. Not everyone, certainly not all critics, like what they do; but it’s a mark of the Wells’s inventive global reach that they are now added to the production portfolio. No other London venue could have brought it off. Tickets, already on sale for a month, will soon have to be begged, borrowed and stolen.

Unlike the Royal Ballet, however, Sadler’s Wells is not a company—and Spalding intends to keep it that way. Gritty programmes by other pioneering international figures, such as the Belgians Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Alain Platel, have graced the Wells proscenium under Spalding’s stewardship and will continue to do so.

This unashamedly continental work is rarely comfortable, showing psychological trauma, ritual and repetition, absence of love, loss of self. (As it happens, similar territory was traversed by Kenneth MacMillan in Covent Garden’s classic ballets such as Manon and Mayerling.) But what drives Spalding is a hunger for new choreography which, whether brought in from elsewhere or created on site, gets people talking, puts bums on seats and leads to more new work.

“Profit from any of our own shows goes into new ideas,” says Spalding. “By not being a company, we can stay fleet of foot.”

In one of the boldest steps the theatre has ever taken, the Wells will next year collaborate with the Barbican in staging 12 shows by the late German choreographer Pina Bausch. The programme is part of the cultural Olympiad—sport and dance complementing each other somewhat—and so, as the world comes to London, it will bring to the world the work of one of the late 20th century’s most important dance figures. A new Wim Wenders film about her, Pina, has also just been released in Britain.

Bausch, who died in 2009, was sui generis. She put more “theatre” into her dance (rocks, waterfights, newspapers on fire, a model hippo, a collapsing wall, a field of carnations) than many a straight theatre production would dream of. She reinvented the 1920s form Tanztheater (dance theatre), and, over four decades with her company Tanztheater Wuppertal, fashioned a wackily individualistic style that drew on expressionism, surrealism and the dancers’ private experience. They often talked out loud.

Bausch also spawned a legion of imitators. This has sometimes given modern dance a bad name—and she isn’t alone in inspiring uncritical imitation. As Swiss choreographer Martin Schläpfer said some years ago, “Pina [was] an exceptional artist, but it’s been too easy for others after her to come along and say, ‘This is Tanztheater.’ You can’t just copy what she does and expect to be admired.” Wiebke Hüster, chief dance critic of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, is sterner: “Dance is about moves, steps. Pina just asked her dancers about their childhoods, and the results were often very petit-bourgeois.”

Still, the constituents of Bausch are, as they can be in any dance, joy, yearning, exuberance, daring, fear—and, in her case, humour. She provides what we want from dance: to be transported.

It feels as if there is an unprecedented amount of dance in Britain today. London Mayor Boris Johnson, looking ahead to the Olympics, has pledged to get 3m Londoners dancing in 2012 under a scheme called the Big Dance. If you’re in Edinburgh in August for this year’s festival, dance from Asia will be thick on the ground, while in Ipswich the Jerwood DanceHouse, a major dockside venue, will through July host Be-Dom, a fantastically inventive, rowdy troupe from Portugal—a kind of Iberian version of the renowned Stomp (who dance with, among other objects, dustbin lids).

Back in London on the South Bank, marking 60 years of the Festival of Britain—where dance has always been central—there’ll be dance bands through the summer and, from 14th to 17th July, a weekend of hip-hop. Meanwhile at the Place near Euston, one of the country’s busiest centres for new choreography, two June highlights include Frauke Requardt’s Episode and In Good Company, an evening of pieces by members of a Brighton ensemble run by the prolific Israeli-born Hofesh Shechter.

But how do you get to make this kind of art—to become a choreographer? Russell Maliphant, who trained as a dancer at the Royal Ballet School and whose lyrical Afterlight is having a brief revival at Sadler’s Wells, says there’s no formula: “It’s difficult to say how it happened for me. Some people, dancers, plan right from the start. When I was dancing, I figured that was enough. I couldn’t see how you could do both. Then, because of the companies I worked with, who did a lot of improvisation, I could see there was a path. Choreography isn’t something you can train for. You just do it.”

Groundbreaking dance-makers—MacMillan, McGregor, Maliphant—don’t fall from trees, and artists like Guillem come along once in a lifetime. But because of them, and climate-shapers like Alistair Spalding, Britain’s dance scene is currently one of the most thrilling in the world.