The week in dance: Rachid Ouramdane: Outsider; Pam Tanowitz: Neither Drums Nor Trumpets

The Guardian

30-03-2025

It's a rule of life that dancers can do anything with their bodies. In Rachid Ouramdane's new work, Outsider, made with the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève, they slide across the stage like oil, tumbling and curling like acrobats, swinging one another around like supple dolls. One woman falls and rises like a pendulum across a mass of bodies that gently push her from side to side.
The stage, in Sylvain Giraudeau's stark design, is crisscrossed with a cat's cradle of taut climbing wires held on gantries. French-Algerian choreographer Ouramdane's stroke of magic is to introduce four extreme sport athletes who hang aloft seamlessly in semi-silhouette, their weightlessness contrasting with the gravity-bound dancers beneath. When they walk the tightrope, their arms wobble gently as they seek balance.
Towards the close, they pull up four dancers from below, letting them dangle lengthways like human mobiles. Against Stéphane Graillot's pale lighting, and accompanied by Julius Eastman's minimalist score, the effect is meditative, transfixing. It's also slightly alienating: dance as an exercise in physics and composition. The excellent dancers are ciphers, parts of a puzzle.
It's thanks to the thrilling range of London's Van Cleef & Arpels Dance Reflections festival that it was possible to watch Outsider on the same day as a new piece by the American choreographer Pam Tanowitz that uses pattern in a much more human way.
Neither Drums Nor Trumpets (the title taken from a line in a film by François Truffaut) is performed in the up-close space of the Royal Opera House's Paul Hamlyn Hall. Using seven of her own dancers and a phalanx of students from the Rambert School, Tanowitz weaves a layered 45-minute work that fills the room with movement and life, at once rigorous and playful, tugging at aspects of the building's history as a floral and dance hall.
Her dancers are in flowery costumes (by Maile Okamura, who also performs), and the score composed by Caroline Shaw additionally features long stretches of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and a scratchy recording of Second Hand Rose, sung by Fanny Brice and beloved by Tanowitz's late mentor, the postmodernist choreographer David Gordon, to whom the work is dedicated.
What's so impressive about Neither Drums Nor Trumpets is the power of its structure; the way Tanowitz builds repeated skeins of complex movement that thread in and out of the piece, conjuring ideas and fleeting thoughts. There are deep balances on one leg, little hugs of the arms across the body, sharp jumps from standing with arms raised like Merce Cunningham angels.
At moments, the dancers sit thoughtfully, legs curled, like the Little Mermaid or a Nijinsky faun. Victor Lozano, in silver trainers, taps quietly round the performance square. Caitlin Scranton and Anson Zwingelberg crouch on their haunches and walk like children. Marc Crousillat carries the ethereal Christine Flores like a dart and then a scrunched-up ball. Lindsey Jones jumps across the stage, arms flailing wildly, then flattens herself against a screen. They are all superb – strong, striving human, raw.
The students, meanwhile, make grave processions of detailed movement, the most basic dance positions of dance vocabulary transformed into subtle embroideries. Seeing these young dancers alongside professionals is remarkably inspiring – it feels like a gift to the future.
Star ratings (out of five)Outsider ★★★Neither Drums Nor Trumpets ★★★★