Dark Arteries + Four Elements + Frames

Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London EC1

4/5

BILLED as a commemoration of the 1984-5 miners’ strike, Dark Arteries makes its impact not so much as a narrative marking the experience of the miners and their families in the Glamorgan coalfields but more as a tribute to a vibrant, collective human spirit which endures and stands firm.

Rambert’s production is a powerful music and dance work and how could it be otherwise with the presence onstage of the 32-strong Tredegar Town Band band, whose thunderous brass belts out throughout. Their  playing draws impassioned performances from a full company of dancers.

The effect of those figures in constant industrial motion, combined with an extraordinarily complex experimental musical score by Gavin Higgins, is mesmerising.

Mark Baldwin’s choreography transforms the dancers into lines of coal-coloured veins, recoiling and then reconnecting as a mass of unified and defiant elements.

Sharp shards of sound clash with more familiar sounding melodies as the muscularity of the choreography conjures images of a dignified community of organised labour, progressing forwards despite the depredations of a brutal state.

In contrast, Lucinda Childs’s choreography for Four Elements shimmers with brightly coloured motifs in a meditation on the interaction of masculine and feminine forces and the elemental qualities of water, earth, fire and air.

In Frames by Alexander Whitley the dancers assemble steel rods and through articulated movement anchor their position in structures which both contain and propel their physical trajectories.

Liam Francis and Brenda Lee Grech provide an exhilarating duet while Dane Hurst and Hannah Rudd, displaying technical exuberance in Four Elements, rise to the challenge of control and complexity Whitley’s piece demands.

But however striking those individual performances, it is the group work and its collective impact in Dark Arteries which lingers in the mind.