British Dance Edition, Sadler’s Wells, London

An illuminating, if desolating, evening in Rosebery Avenue late last week at an event described as “the UK dance industry’s leading showcase, presenting the best of British dance to promoters and producers from the UK and across the globe. The event is an initiative of the National Dance Network and takes place biennially.” (This event, of course, eschews the practitioners of classic ballet.) What I saw was a parade of the stupefyingly unlikely, involving three troupes – Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance; Candoco Dance, which presents dancers both disabled and able-bodied; the Hofesh Shechter Company. As a sampling supposed to be representative of “the best of British dance” it was, to my disbelieving eye and affronted ear-drums, a monstrous display of the portentous and the gimcrack.

Could “promoters and producers from across the globe” be gulled into supposing that McGregor’s Far, with its wrenched and aggressive torsos that seem to mimic extreme muscular dysfunction, its flickering light installation, its dismal din as accompaniment, was the best of British dance rather than modish posturing? Was Candoco’s acquisition of a version of Set and Reset – a glum display owed to the American dance-maker Trisha Brown 30 years ago, and now re-cast and re-shaped for this troupe, and with an accompaniment as foolish as its movement – representative in its sluggish way of “British dance”? Was The Art of Not Looking Back, a crass, ear-offending and seemingly anti-feminist diatribe staged by the Israeli-born choreographer Hofesh Shechter, dance to export?

As a study in the coarse, the blatant, in dance as blunt instrument, this nasty affair, like the rest of the evening, had a certain macabre interest. I might observe that, throughout the event, music is reduced to racket, to a Tom and Jerry sound-track; that design is skilled and far outstrips the dance; and, crucially, that the distortion of the human frame, the illogicalities and broken forms of muscular dysfunction and neurological failure, are the commonplaces by which such choreography seeks to mask its inadequacy as a communicative art.

The evening was, I venture, miserably blinkered in its choices and the worst possible advocate for British dance creativity.

www.britishdanceedition.com