Didy Veldman’s “The 3 Dancers” stood out in Rambert’s triple bill, “Love, Art and Rock ‘n’ Roll” - an evening at Sadler’s Wells featuring works by three different choreographers, each one responding to the themes of the title.Art reprises a “Picasso.mania,” not only at the current exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris – which groups and juxtaposes works by the master and various artists who got inspired by him - but also at Rambert, bringing Picasso’s links to the world of ballet back on stage. A recent commission of choreographer Didy Veldman for the company, draws from Picasso’s painting “The Three Dancers” (1925), which entered the Tate collection in 1965. The painting relates a love triangle involving two of Picasso’s friends - Ramon Pichot and Carlos Casagemas - and their love flame, Germaine Gargallo, who has also been his. It depicts three figures, each more distorted than the other, haunted by love, betrayal, and death. Like the painting, Vildman’s triadic ballet is a kind of Dance of Death.“The 3 Dancers” starts with what Veldman perceived of the painting and ends with what we all see within it. Together with her design team she deconstructs its iconography and metamorphoses it into three dimensions. Taking cues from Picasso’s monochromatic period, colours from the painting have been removed. Kimie Nakano’s simple geometric sets evoke the multifocal views of synthetic cubism: a white square flooring placed diagonally on the stage looking like a cut-out of the contrasting black cube which, balanced on one of its corners, stands vertically at the back of the stage.The three lead dancers are dressed in bright, canvas-like white costumes, and, like a tabula rasa, together animate some stories of the love triangle before these are immortalised into a single pose. This trio of dancers connects and disconnects with their darker sides or shadows, two male and a female dancer costumed in black. Like yin and yang, the two trios represent the opposing forces and emotional conflicts that stood between the three characters of the painting. Mesmerized to the original orchestral score by Elena Kats-Chernin, each trio hold hands and never let go. They interlock and entwine with legs upraised, spiralling in-between them, lifting one another, until gradually they spread across the stage and part.Ben Ormerod’s atmospheric, slightly sky-blue lighting then changes, with blackouts leading our eye to different directions. A manipulative duet, with two males pushing against the other, is joined in inebriated fashion by another male couple, possessed by anger and jealously. Their masculine gestures suggest both power and limbo and are semi-reflected into the two giant, plexiglass fragmented triangles - resembling the windows of the painting - which drop onto the stage and intersect diagonally; pointed as knifes or the sharp splinters of Picasso’s figures, they also allude their tragic deaths.When the lead trio reach harmonious climax in conjunction to the melodic score, the lights dim and the music shifts to a more dynamic rhythm as their triadic dark side enter onstage. The trio clad in white hold hands and dance until they fall to their deaths; the black one then freeze into Picasso’s final vision - they become it - and we are all left in awe. Now refined by each trinity, these two final poses synthesise the Dionysian and the Apollonian that Picasso grasped in his iconic painting.Love is the subject of Kim Brandstrup’s new work for Rambert, “Transfigured Night,” that tells the story from Richard Dehmel’s poem (1896), which inspired the score (1899) Arnold Schoenberg wrote of the same name. When at the third scene Dane Hurst took to the stage in a remarkable solo, then joined by the flawless Hannah Rudd, Brandstrupt’s choreographic imagination in tandem with the dancers’ virtuosity, saw a climax of emotions; the two were ethereal, rolling on the floor and taking to the sky as lightly as two autumn leaves.Rock then rolled onto stage with a revival of Christopher Bruce’s dynamic and humorous “Rooster” - first performed in 1994 - set to eight of the most famous songs of the Rolling Stones. A now classic for the British audience, Bruce’s piece retains a timeless freshness because the Stones’ music, and his impressive choreography that celebrates the swinging sixties, won’t fade away. Rambert’s triple bill, “Love, art and rock ‘n’ roll” to 7 November 2015, at Sadler’s Wells, London.
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