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Sadler's Wells, London
Music creates the challenges as well as the pleasures of Rambert's latest mixed bill – and nowhere more so than in Paul Taylor's 1985 Roses. Wagner's Siegfried Idyll, to which the first half of the dance is set, is music whose delicacy and yearning cry out for choreographed expression. Yet most choreographers would still regard it as un-danceable. So long and lush are Wagner's melodic lines they defy gravity, and transcend the limits of the body.
But Taylor isn't your average choreographer. Even where Wagner's music suspends into thin air, he can still hear the lilt of a dance pulse, driving the movement forward with surprising speed. And while Roses embraces the romanticism of its score in the sweetly unfolding sequence of duets for its five couples, the Valentine card fragrance of the title is countered by the severity of the work's structure. While one couple dances, the other four freeze into a formal, almost archaic chorus, holding poses of gravity and contemplation. And while Taylor rises to moments of Wagnerian ecstasy in sweeping lifts and keening backbends, he humanises the dancers with tiny gestures of intimacy – as simple as a woman tucking her head into the crook of a man's arm.
More cleverly still, in the work's coda, Taylor justifies the shift to a completely different score (Baermann's Adagio for Clarinet and Strings) by having one new couple dance a slow but ineffably tender duet that finally brings them into the collective embrace of the group. It's a statement of collective harmony as well as individual love. And the masterful simplicity of the image allows us to believe, momentarily, in its utopian vision.
Roses makes a very clever foil to Tim Rushton's Monolith. Set to Peteris Vasks's Piano Quartet, it too evokes an ancient world, although one more violent than Taylor's. On a stage dominated by black columns and with a distant view of mountains, the 11 dancers move with a heroic stridency and scale. At first, Vasks's music has an agitated speed that amplifies their blunt, striding, shouldering moves. But as the music unravels to a silvery thinness, the dancers in the closing duet lose their grip on each other, as if divided by questions and uncertainties. They look to us like our spiritual ancestors, living with issues of life and death as intractable and jagged as the landscape.
Opening the evening is a repeat of Henrietta Horn's Cardoon Club. Benjamin Pope's 60s pastiche score provides the most obviously dancey sounds of the evening. Yet while Horn's witty fusion of minimalism and high tack has real charisma, at 45 minutes the work is, literally, twice as long as it needs to be.
