Petronio vs Phoenix: Phoenix Dance Company and Stephen Petronio

With Stephen Petronio and Phoenix Dance Theatre fighting for their audience share in the same week, The Theatre Royal became the place for dance-lovers. Petronio’s association with Scottish Ballet – he did the piece to Radiohead in their last triple bill, as well as their fierce pan-sexual repertoire favourite MiddleSex Gorge – makes his work familiar to Glasgow audiences: slightly kitsch, using strong classical technique, emotive music and spectacular costumes. Phoenix, on the other hand, are an English company who have works by Jose Limon, one of the many contemporary choreographers who worked throughout the twentieth century to develop an alternative to classical ballet.

Surprisingly, neither bill is as tight or cohesive as Scottish Ballet’s recent programme. For Phoenix, Limon’s Chaconne and Moor’s Pavane are dated and pedestrian: the variations on the theme of Othello feel mannered and the solo Chaconne is little more than a refined display of technique. Fascinating for balletomanes and students of the shifts in dance over the past century, perhaps, they lack either earthiness or relevance and are performed in an almost perfunctory manner.

Petronio’s much heralded collaborations with Rufus Wainwright are disappointingly insipid. Although much has been made of Petronio’s use of popular music – like he’s the only person who has noticed that pop shares a vitality with modern dance – Wainwright’s horrible caterwauling ruins Bloom. Somehow convinced that multi-tracking his own drone makes him sound like a medieval choir rather than a Queen out-take, Wainwright intones some of America’s worst poetry with the seriousness of a stoned twelve year old encountering Shakespeare. The dancers illustrate Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and their painful, obvious thoughts. “Hope is a thing with feathers” indeed. What, you mean a turkey?

Far better is Petronio’s finale, a much older work Lareigne. Using electronic music and a more meditative, floating choreography, the company achieve a fleeting intangibility and elegance, and the procession of solos, duets and ensemble sections build to a gentle, sensuous climax. Abandoning the show-boating of the first two pieces, Lareigne sways and coos, seductive and submarine.

It is a sharp contrast to Phoenix’s closer, the brief, jerky, fitful Harmonica Breakdown. Another revival from a 1938 American original, Janes Dudley garbs the rough hewn blues of Sonny Terry and gives it a visual approximation. Anita Hutchins commands the stage for three minutes of solo, simultaneously a bravura display of physical confidence and vulnerability. Along with Javier De Frutos’ Blue Roses, Harmonica Breakdown lifted Phoenix out from the mundane into a more engaged and exciting company.

A missed matched pair of mixed bills, both hinting at companies who have an uneven repertoire and plenty to offer. Two for the enthusiasts and scholars, despite some lively and intriguing moments.