We were absolutely blown away by Rambert’s evocation of Peaky Blinders last year, so were really excited to see the talented mavericks of dance perform Death Trap: Cerberus and Goat, two short pieces by Ben Duke.
Starting with Cerberus – which is billed as a meta dance comedy about the turbulence of life and death – we hear a woman’s voice as she sets the scene, telling us that her birth will be depicted as she enters the stage and her death as she exits stage left. Pulled by a rope, we see her fight her fate, then disappear. A stage hand finds himself being told she’s dead – but surely she’s just missing? No – it appears stage left is a porthole to the afterworld.
After this we see lines and lines of dancers make their own individual journeys from life to possible death – each dancing in their own particular stye – whether jerky and jittery, passionate or possessed or marching purposefully. It’s powerful, exciting stuff.
Goat, meanwhile, is inspired by the music of Nina Simone. There’s a live on-stage band and singer Sheree DuBois is sublime. The stage is set in a meeting hall where a group of dancers meet to perform some sort of sacrifice. Only, it’s not a goat they’re offering up – rather one of the men is chosen to dance himself to death.
Filming the ritual is an annoyingly intrusive interviewer who wades in to ask inane questions about what each dancer is trying to depict in their subversive movements. He gets comically exaggerated answers which cleverly satirise modern dance..
The piece ends with an emotionally tender – and at the same time deliberately ‘awkward’ duet between a lover attempting to resurrect her dead partner – it’s wonderful. But we wanted to see more like this. More dance. There’s just not enough of it in either piece. Instead, we felt there was too much dialogue, too many attempts at telling the story in words when the dancing should have done the talking. After all, that’s what we came for. To see drama through dance. Because that’s what Rambert do best and brilliantly.
Rambert’s Death Trap is on at Wales Millennium Centre until 9 April.