Rambert Dance Company, Sadler's Wells, London
You wouldn't dream this up in a million years
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Your support makes all the difference.It's not often you find creative artist who is also computer nerd, but eightysomething Merce Cunningham is that rare bird. Ground Level Overlay - premiered by Cunningham's own company and newly acquired by Rambert - is a direct product of his fascination with digital stuff.
Its appeal is that computer can suggest sequences that the choreographer's imagination - bounded by its experience of how arms, legs and torsos normally operate, one action leading naturally to another - wouldn't dream up in a million years.
The result is, as you'd expect, a clinical, de-fleshed kind of dance, devoid of outward emotion but no less affecting for that. The glimmers of humanity that seep between the cracks in its cool, pixelated surface throw the dancers' pulse-quickened qualities into curiously sharp relief - like Star Trek's Mr Spock shedding a brief, un-android tear.
Hazy golden lighting and a backdrop of scrap metal and knotted rope suggest a hoard thrown up by oceans. Even more atmospheric is Stuart Dempster's score for 10 trombones recorded inside an empty two million-gallon water tank. Resembling something between a whale song and fog horns, the resonant layering of multiple tones creates a sense of utter desolation and emptiness - almost grand in its indifference to humankind.
Under these influences the dancers' otherwise arbitrary movements can be seen as eddies and currents, congregations of fish or sea birds, sometimes even rocks and clouds. In its reluctance to over-impose, Rambert's beautifully controlled performance is poetic.
Other novelties of the company's London fortnight showed off the troupe's famously wide range. Christopher Bruce's Grinning In Your Face - 10 cameos of poor, rural Midwest America inspired by the dustbowl music of guitarist Martin Simpson - is attractive, folksy, but doesn 't flinch from depicting ugly injustice. The lynching number is all the more chilling for its subtlety.
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