You’re handed earplugs as you enter the Linbury for ‘Aisha and Abhaya’, a new work from Rambert that benefits from the state-of-the-art production that the Royal Opera House’s second stage can offer. Exciting, eh? Sadly, the promise of sonic fireworks remains unfulfilled, much like the promise of the whole venture.
Director Kibwe Tavares is a filmmaker who hadn’t previously created a live performance, and by his own admission knew next to nothing about contemporary dance before being commissioned by Rambert. So a good half of this hour-long production is a lavishly directed film, in which two sisters – Salomé Pressac and Maëva Berthelot, dressed in fantasy-Armenian-bride extravagance by Uldus Bakhtiozina – are washed up on a foreign shore, having escaped a war in their country, and stumble across a fireside bacchanal in the woods. Without being told that the genesis for this story was Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Match Girl’, you would be hard-pressed to guess.
This is interspersed with sections of dance created by the Israeli choreographers Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar, to the techno/trance music of their regular collaborators Ori Lichtik and Gaika. Seven dancers, including a luminous Berthelot, perform Eyal’s club-inspired, muscular contemporary moves – pulsing, thrusting and undulating to an insistent beat, often in synch, with blank faces, slow-motion movement, catwalk struts, raised arms and jabbing elbows, and a punishing amount of time on tiptoes. Flashy visuals create the illusion of them flying through endless tunnels and corridors, or being in front of a homogenous mass of hunch-shouldered dancers.
It’s Eyal-by-numbers, rather cold but strangely mesmerising, performed with utter commitment by the Rambert dancers. But what it has to do with Tavares’s narrative remains a mystery; it’s as if two unconnected pieces have been inexpertly stitched together. And its unsatisfactory ending crosses the line from ambiguous to baffling. How disappointing.