Turn It Out with Tiler Peck & Friends / Tom Dale Company

March 2023

In 1960 Martha Graham made a dance called Acrobats of God, a comic celebration of dancers. She cast one man as a ringmaster who, as her then manager later wrote, “puts them through hazards and death-defying stunts […] for circus reasons, to delight, astonish, and bedazzle with the skill of it all, but also to parody the stunts themselves and to laugh at virtuosity practiced in art as an end in itself.”

Parody has nearly vanished now from dance, and virtuosity as an end in itself has ballooned beyond recognition, often leaving no room on a stage for anything else.

You see it everywhere, for example in Turn It Out with Tiler Peck & Friends, which arrived at Sadler’s Wells with a rousing mix of choreography by Peck, who is a principal dancer with New York City Ballet and organized the program, Alonzo King, Michelle Dorrance and William Forsythe.

Dressed in delectable sherbet colors, Peck’s sextet, Thousandth Orange, reflected the playful lyricism of Caroline Shaw’s score for the string/piano ensemble onstage. King’s Swift Arrow, a spiky, off-balance pas de deux, challenged Peck and Roman Mejia to match the jagged angularity of Jason Moran’s piano score, also played live onstage.

Dorrance and her two collaborators—Jillian Meyers and Peck—joined eight further dancers and two onstage singers in Time Spell, an amplified jam session of tap, ballet, rhythmic clapping and vocal scat that got louder and faster as it progressed.

Its noise and energy might have exhausted the audience, but Forsythe’s The Barre Project, Blake Works II, made for streaming during lockdown, is even more captivating live. His disciplined delight in ballet’s rigorous geometry and quirky flexibility came at us with an immediacy that the screen can never convey, and the movement’s speed and shifting perspectives dared us to keep up. 

Blake’s music gave the ballet its character, as did Peck, Mejia, Lex Ishimoto and Brooklyn Mack, who met Forsythe’s meticulous ingenuity eagerly and in about 25 minutes offered enough classical ballet, jazz and modern dance to fill an entire program.

Several weeks later, Tom Dale brought his Sub-Version and Surge to The Place. Shaped by his desire “to put the body at the centre of digital interaction,” the first work was an acrobatic solo for the riveting Jemima Brown, who sang to electronic music by Ital Tek as she danced; the second piece was a quartet that Dale set to “tracks from Wen’s EPHEM:ERA album in which he creates instrumental grime nuggets: brief samples of mood rather than full explorations.” 

Relentlessly upstaged by space-splitting laser beams and dizzying patterns projected onto the floor, the dancers struggled to dominate the technology. In Sub-Version, the effects distracted us from Brown’s astonishing transformation into a robot of jaw-dropping strength and agility, and they trapped us into viewing Surge as an evening of hectic clubbing.

For me, the result was a zero sum game: all the effort expended yielded only expended effort. The Barre Project aside, in these pieces I discovered terrific dancers used as precision tools demonstrating the fact that they’re precision tools. They looked fantastic, worth every second of our attention and applause, but they seldom showed us anything except their command over their bodies. Rendered impersonal, they seemed almost interchangeable.

The chance of anyone producing great choreography can be plotted on a bell curve like any other probability. Among recent creations you’ll find a few masterpieces, a few stinkers, and a vast assortment of dances that fall somewhere in between, many of them defined by their extraordinary technical demands. But that definition creates a problem: what happens when the public loses interest in virtuosity?

It’s like the old story about the man who’s invited to the races and then asked why he doesn’t place a bet. The man responds, ”I know all the horses will run in the same direction at the same time, and I don’t really care which one finishes first.”

Tom Dale Company tours this program until early May.  tomdale.org.uk