les ballets C de la B have become extremely important in the world of contemporary dance and a new work by Alain Platel is eagerly anticipated by London audiences. Before the show I sat outside Sadler’s Wells, eating (so as to avoid the distracting hunger pangs that so often strike in the middle of 90 minute dance works…) and watching the audience arrive: a mess of Spanish and English and French, cigarettes, long hair, linen pants, high heels, glasses of wine and many kisses on many cheeks. I wonder whether C de la B fit into the contemporary dance equivalent of literary fiction.

The stage looked immense, wing-less, barren except for three microphones and a neat pile of red blankets. It’s an incredible space – wide and high, and as the eight dancers walked on stage in casual clothes from different places in the audience they looked teeny tiny. I began to wait for the moment when their equally immense stage presences would burst forth and fill the emptiness. For the drama. Platel plays with this expectation, the dancers move between being small and human or powerful creatures almost godlike. I sometimes feel alienated by Platel’s work as the dancers can seem a bit Untouchable, wrapped up in the moment and their Show and I, with no way in, stop caring. There was more tenderness here.

In true contemporary dance style they walked to the back of the stage and took off their clothes. Stripped down to their seemingly-casually-varied-and-‘individual’-underwear and cast the red blankets around themselves like cloaks. Slowly they began to repeat a flick of one foot. Like a knight, like the knight’s horse, like the Minotaur, cloaked beasts, like they were aroused, like cows in a farm being kept warm in winter, like an over-used contemporary dance move, like a meaningful gesture, like they were being swept off their feet and kissed, like a poster for an old-fashioned romcom. It’s a beautiful image. And with every different rhythm that they perform the gesture, a new scene is evoked.

This goes on for a while.

More elaborate dancing begins to happen.

Then the seriousness that verges on the lofty (perhaps?) is broken. The cloaks fall. A minimal electronic beat begins and the dancers move in time. The woman that looks like Frida Kahlo dances to the central microphone and stands behind it with her impenetrable face and asks “Who let the dogs out?” to laughter from the house, then her body resumes the pulse. It’s great, maybe not genius but great: they do these mad dances that look like something one might do in the house, you know, when a song you love comes on and you turn up the sound and you just came out of the shower and it’s the morning so the day doesn’t yet have a status and you do Your Dance (then add impressive virtuosic feats, years of technical training, an audience, highly idiosyncratic badass way of moving and whatever it is that makes you the crème de la crème and gets you into Les Ballets C de la B). The beats begin to layer and more lines from well known pop songs are spoken/sang in amusing accents, sometimes put on sometimes not. The big black empty space that the stage began as is turned into a club for these half starkers (naked), half raving (mad) performers. Good stuff.

Even more goodness happens when one guy begins to lipsynch “Comme si j'n'existais pas elle est passee a cote de moi…” - the opening lyrics to Khaled’s ‘Aicha’. This song is glorious until cut mid-way. This is the only moment in the piece that is uncomfortably jarring.

Party over.

At some point a woman brings a baby on stage and the dancers mimic it. Weird moment. As is one dancer caressing his inflated belly for a rather long time.

Microphones are held in mouths and moans with added reverb are put on loop, passed around and layered, we are reminded of the size of the space, a certain gravity begins to fill it, the sounds could be of distress, some inner struggle. The air becomes thicker and the muscularity of the movement, the muscles of the dancers, are emphasised. I remember the ‘For Pina’ part of the title. I remember Pina Bausch is dead.

Gravity.

I realise that I haven’t said much about the actual movement, in this piece the dancers really ‘spoke’ with their physicality; they appeared as beings whose minds were spread over every point of their bodies. But, I feel that the impressive highly skilled and idiosyncratic way of moving that each member of the cast has, is allowed too much free reign. By this I mean that there doesn’t seem to be as much attention paid to the particularities of the movement vocabulary in different ‘scenes’ as I would like. At times they even merge.

This piece is minimal yet rich and the best work I have seen by Platel.

'Alain Platel's Out of Context - for Pina' by les ballets C de la B, 17-18 June 2010 Sadler's Wells