Microphobia

As vanity projects go, Nina Ananiashvili's appearances with the Moscow Dance Theatre are remarkably self-effacing. The Georgian ballerina, who inspires reverence to the point of worship as a principal both with the Bolshoi in Moscow and American Ballet Theater in New York, has nothing left to prove in the technical department and little incentive to conquer new audiences. What she is keen to do, it seems, is show what Russian- schooled dancers can do with recent choreography from around the world; to persuade us that the grand Bolshoi manner can adapt and thrive.

In theory that's admirable, but the first of the two mixed programmes she and her former dance partner, the ex-Bolshoi director Alexei Fadeyechev, brought to Sadler's Wells said little for her judgement. From the opening moments of Green, a piece of sub- Balanchinerie by Stanton Welch that borrows shamelessly from Serenade, we enter that heart-sinking territory of aimless wafting, feminised men and dull neo-classicism that gives ballet a bad name.

In this dance equivalent of a Past Times tea towel even the Vivaldi fiddle concertos come by the yard. Eight women in long skirts salute some invisible spirit of greenery while two men in bare chests perform endless pirouettes. To give them their due, Dmitri Belogolovtsev and Andrei Uvarov look terrific when they first appear, tall and lean-muscled as racehorses. The problems start when they take to spinning, leaning further out of kilter at each revolution until they topple to a stop. In view of this technical weakness it seems rash, not to say cruel, to draw attention to it.

Ananiashvili's solo role meanders soulfully through this sea of vacuousness, though it would take choreography more witless than this to mask her star quality: the arms supple as willow, the reach and line wondrously long. But the haircut is disastrous: a floppy bob that's soon hanging in sweaty clumps over the dancer's eyes.

She looks happier all round in the other work made especially for her, a piece she calls her new Giselle. Alexei Ratmansky's Leah is a rendering of the Jewish play The Dybbuk, set to a big Bernstein score played live. It's not a story that translates easily into dance, involving broken promises, the Kabbalah, verbal black magic and the fatal invasion of a girl's body by her dead lover's soul. Without the synopsis you're lost. Yet Ratmansky addresses the story's broader themes with such imaginative verve that you forgive the narrative fuzz.

On a stage peopled like a Kandinsky painting Leah's tragedy is played out with fierce intensity and the choreography is strong on group imagery. Ananiashvili as the distraught bride, about to wed the wrong man, unleashes her full expressive range in the mad scene and becomes truly demonic when she leaps like a streak of lightning to strangle the hapless groom. It made me curious to see her Giselle.

Trey McIntyre's Second Before the Ground is much the most coherent of the night's offerings, though it omits the company's star. A set of sunny variations and group larks originally made for Houston Ballet, the dancers clearly relish its technical challenges which they answer with typical Russian brio. What's distracting, though, is the Soviet-style delivery they are unable to shake off. That perfumed grandeur looks slightly deranged in this hoedown setting. But then, the Russians have never known how to do casual. If they want to look like Americans, they still have some way to go.

CandoCo, the company that pioneered "integrated" dance, also seems to be courting a crisis of identity. Having spent the past 10 years or so convincing audiences that disability art needn't be worthily PC, that virtuosity isn't confined to the able-bodied and that wheelchairs can be mean machines, it has hit a major snag. It's suffering from a surfeit of working limbs.

Where in the past audiences have been sent away humbled or awed by the winning grace of a one-legged female amputee, still more a man with no legs at all, they are currently faced with a company of perfectly regular- looking types, two of whom are on wheels. This may explain the desperation of Microphobia, the crude hotchpotch of drama exercise and verbal infelicity that comprises CandoCo's commission from Luca Silvestrini and Bettina Strickler.

In a deliberately manic take-off of the Paraplegic Olympics, the chair users zoom about, ducking obstacles, wheels changed Brands Hatch-style. A man whose legs we know to be useless engages in an amorous roll-about with an able-bodied girl. Are we supposed to be shocked? Pundits pontificate into microphones with a breathtaking shallowness .

Confidence is somewhat restored in Stephen Petronio's The Human Suite, if only because Petronio does these performers the honour of applying exactly the same aesthetic principles to this project as he does to his own company. Unfortunately, he also replicates many of his rumpled, sensuous dance ideas, which I confess I would rather see performed by the New Yorker's slightly dangerous own-brand company (visiting these shores very soon) than by the decent but terminally nice dancers of CandoCo.

jenny.gilbert@independent.co.uk

CandoCo: Wyvern Theatre, Swindon (01793 524481), 23 March; Lighthouse, Poole (01202 685222), 25 & 26 March; tour continues

Dance choice

Voces y Ecos

Brief revival of the best flamenco show in years, devised by Paco Pena and Jude Kelly. Theatre Royal, Glasgow (0141 332 9000) Thur to Sat

Henry Oguike Dance Company

Quality contemporary dance and on-stage string quartet. Contact, Manchester (0161 274 0600), Thur; Everyman, Liverpool (0151 709 4776), Fri & Sat; tour continues

Copyright 2004 Independent Newspapers UK Limited
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.