(LA)HORDE is a Paris-based collective of artists — Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer, and Arthur Harel — who work across a variety of art forms and have served as artistic directors of the Ballet National de Marseille since 2019.

They describe their approach of using contemporary dance as a means of protest and connection as ‘post-internet dance,’ that is inclusive, political and uncompromisingly innovative. Bring Your Own, a programme of three pieces certainly fits into that vision.

The show opens with a new piece Hop(e)storm – with the emphasis on the hop. This is Lindy Hop, mixed with rave and created especially for the unbounded energy of the brilliant Rambert dancers. Watching it you can almost imagine yourself joining in. The kicking feet and low jumps appear easy moves. It’s how people feeling full of confidence on the dance floor think they look. In reality, this appearance of free and easy is so controlled and synchronised by the dancers it is amazing it is possible.

The strength and control of the dancers is pushed to the extreme in the remainder of the programme which features two restagings of (LA)Horde’s pieces Weather is Sweet and Room with a View.

Weather is Sweet is inspired by the LA club scene and invites questions about intimacy, consent and sex-positivity. This is the piece where you can see the 15+ age guidance is needed, with no holds barred approach to the sexual imagery on the stage. It doesn’t so much feel erotic as frenzied. At one point a dancer is pushing another dancer’s bottom down and from side to side as if playing basketball. We definitely need the interval break after that.

The final piece, A Room with a View leads with another highly charged emotion with the anger of injustice and protest coming to the fore.  The imagery is chaotic, with dancers fighting (punching and biting each other), while others raise a defiant middle finger to the crowd. Much of this is choreographed with extremes of motion either ultra slow motion or frenetic high speed, to an increasingly loud electronic score from RONE. At times it becomes almost hypnotic and again the control of the dancers is phenomenal.

The whole evening feels like a hymn to youth, on display in all its rawness and brilliance – wow!

Rambert X (LA)HORDE is at Lowry, Salford from 16-18 September 2025.

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The fact this ambitious dance show is touring for the second time in as many years hopefully tells you otherwise. While some might say there were few better ways for the Rambert to fill seats, there certainly would have been easier ones.

Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby is Rambert’s biggest show in its near 100-year history and it feels epic in scale.

There’s always a challenge when bringing something new to the familiar, but fans can be reassured their favourite characters are in good hands with a story written by the original series creator, Steven Knight.

Set as a prequel to the BBC show – how Thomas Shelby and his brothers came to be the men we know – it opens in 1916 with graphic scenes of fighting in the trenches of the Somme. Rambert’s Artistic Director and choreographer Benoit Swan Pouffer holds nothing back from the audience, giving the action a filmic quality which moves at pace.

We’re taken from the horrors of war to the heady atmosphere of a 1920s nightclub, where Tommy (Conor Kerrigan) falls for singer Grace (Naya Lovell) and a tragic love-story begins.

Fans of the show will recognise central characters like Arthur (Dylan Tedaldi), Polly (Simone Damberg Würtz) and Ada (Adél Bálint), but even if you’ve never seen a single episode the essence of the story is easy to follow with the use of some explanatory narration voiced by the late poet, Benjamin Zephaniah, who played a street preacher in the TV show.

An immersive, contemporary score by Roman GianArthur played live on stage, provides an added layer driving the action. There are also recognisable songs from the Peaky soundtrack from Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Radiohead and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. It’s not until the curtain call that we realise this rock gig sound has been created by only three musicians: Yarron Engler (drums, percussion, vocals), Joe Downward (Cello, bass, vocals) and Mitchell Emms (vocals, guitar, keys).

There is so much happening on stage at any one time that you can’t take it all in. But striking throughout is the strength and grace of Rambert’s talented dancers whose performances bring both emotional intensity and a highly stylised edge to this visual storytelling.

It’s a thrilling ride with carousel race horses, punk police dogs, gun weilding women, blazing buildings and centre of it all the iconic Thomas Shelby.

If you like Peaky Blinders – go. If you like Rambert – go. Or just go anyway – it’s a helluva spectacle.

Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby is at Lowry, Salford from 22 to 26 October 2024. Age recommendation 15+

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Death Trap is a new double-bill from Ben Duke, which links two of his previous pieces for Rambert – Cerberus (2022) and his Olivier nominated, Goat (2017). For those who have seen the pieces before, here they remain distinct either side of an interval, but the first piece ends without a curtain call for the dancers and on their return, there is some fluidity in characterisation and, in keeping with the meta theme, there is self-referencing between the two.

Duke is known for creating work that explores the overlaps between dance and theatre, and this programme feels more a work of combined arts than dance. In some ways this makes it a perfect entry point for people unfamiliar with contemporary dance. There is no need to be concerned you won’t know what it is about because this is made clear through dialogue and there is lots of it. For dance purists this could feel a little irritating, but the layers upon layers of referencing will likely give everyone something to chuckle at, even if that something is themselves.

The evening opens with Cerberus, loosely based on the Greek myth Orpheus and Eurydice. Here the mix of real and unreal is used to create a sense of the confusion and disbelief that often accompanies grief. Aishwarya Raut (all characters use dancers’ real names) introduces the concept from a mic off stage. Her entrance at stage right signifies her birth and exiting stage left she dies – or does she?

There is a slapstick comedy element to Antonello Sangiradi’s attempts both to bring back his friend and to stop other dancers experiencing the same fate, but the grief in this mythical tale is so deep-seated there were no audible laughs from the audience on Thursday evening. That said, the light-hearted take on an ancient tale stops the early evening from falling hard into melancholy and the dancers, fuelled by the thumping energy of Romarna Campbell on drums, don’t let us lose sight of life by turning this funeral cortège into a gothic club scene.

After the interval we are all relieved to find Aishwarya is indeed still alive and has now taken the role of a roving TV reporter who insists on getting verbal explanations from each of the dancers about what their movements mean. The audience warms much more to the comedy in this piece with some genuine laugh out loud moments as well as spontaneous whoops and applause, particularly after the exhilarating choreography to Ain’t Got No, I Got Life.

Goat is inspired by the music and spirit of Nina Simone performed on stage by a three-piece band with singer, Sheree DuBois. While this gives a sense of something older, Death Trap as a whole is very much a tale for today and one aimed more at a Gen Z audience.

The overall narrative of Goat is a dark one, focused on a bizarre ritual where one dancer, Jonathan Wade, is chosen to be sacrificed by dancing himself to death. It is all played out on TV with on stage camera zoomed into the dancers’ faces and played back on a screen at the front of the stage. At times there is so much going on with the cameras, the band, the singer, and the acting, that it is not surprising the dance loses focus. But when given centre stage the dance is both intense and mesmerising.

Overall, I enjoyed my first step into self-conscious, meta dance comedy, but I know if I was 20 again, I would have loved it. This was clear in the audience response too. It is a rollercoaster of melodrama, so strap in tight for an emotional ride through the hormone-fuelled passions and fears of youth.

Rambert Dance Death Trap is at The Lowry from 18 – 20 April 2024. As a partner company of The Lowry, Rambert will return again to The Lowry in the Autumn as they bring back Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby from 22 to 26 October 2024.

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It opens with the unsettling Eye Candy, a piece by Imre and Marne van Opstal which claims to show ‘the pains and the pleasures of inhabiting the human body.’ But far from exploring human emotion, the dancers seem more like emotionless mannequins with their blank expressions and stilted movements – an impression heightened by the fake six packs and breasts of their silicon bodysuit costumes.

The objectification of women in particular is a theme throughout, with female dancers groped, grabbed and manipulated like dummies. This sits oddly alongside a vaguely comical duet between two of the male dancers, who gesture, pull faces and make noises.

Ben Duke’s Cerberus blends theatre, dance and comedy in its take on death and Greek mythology. The premise – that a dancer has crossed into the underworld by exiting stage left – is set up by recorded voiceover and two dancers speaking directly to the audience; this provokes laughter but feels overly long as an introduction. Once the piece gets going however, it’s fabulous.

Dancers in all black suits, full-length dresses, lace and headpieces strut across the stage to a pulsating dance music beat as if on a catwalk, breaking out of the line to perform dazzling solo moves. The dramatic, gothic aesthetic of the costumes and vivid red backdrop complements the funereal theme, as does the live performance of Monteverdi’s Lamento della Ninfa. The thumping percussion – also played live – is more of a curveball.

The programme concludes with Following the Subtle Current Upstream, a work which takes inspiration from nature – evident in the green costumes and the use of thunderstorm sounds in the score – and the human search for joy.

Alonzo King’s choreography is definitely a source of joy, its fluidity and dynamism allowing the dancers to flaunt their technique and stamina. Ballet-inspired in shape and movement, King takes classical steps and gives them a contemporary spin. It’s pure, undiluted dance and definitely my highlight of the programme.

Rambert – Dance is at The Lowry from 25-27 May 2022.

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Perhaps surprisingly for a child of the pandemic, a nightmarish air of darkness and threat pervades the whole work. There is an opening montage of disturbing tableaux slowly uncovered by the light of a single flame; large hooks suspended from the ceiling on which the dancers hang themselves, corpse-like; and an extended scene inside a grim hospital corridor, where a dancer in the role of confused patient is stripped and ordered about wordlessly by blank-faced nurses.

It’s not all designed to send audiences screaming for the exits, though. Higher energy sections of Vandekeybus’ choreography showcase the company’s extraordinary talent, with a seamless flow of leaps, turns and spectacular acrobatics. One particularly memorable passage sees a maze of retractable cords criss-crossing the stage, pulled taut by dancers in angular poses, while other members of the cast vault over, dive under and occasionally get caught by the maze. In another, the ensemble dance with lit paper spills, weaving beautiful smoke trails that catch in the stage lights (and prompting me to wonder how much health and safety paperwork there is for this show).

In contrast to the seemingly boundless energy and power of these sections is a quieter moment of physical vulnerability, where the ensemble stagger and shuffle across the stage, convulsing as if in pain. This imitation of ageing and frailty is a stark reminder of the human condition, impactful in its small, understated movements and a demonstration of the company’s range.

This range extends beyond movement – in a literal interpretation of the piece’s title, the cast draw on huge pieces of paper that line the set. They also speak, reciting Ted Hughes poetry, verbally reacting to what’s happening around them, and when playing specific roles such as news reporters. These elements may have translated better directly to camera in the streamed version, as while they are often amusing and well-observed (such as the switchboard operator apologising for her Hungarian accent), they can also feel out of place, particularly when the dancers struggle to make their voices heard over the music.

The soundtrack tears yet another page from the rule book, combining dramatic percussion, brass, electric guitar, Latin rhythms and 1970s soul to conjure “contrasting, vivid theatrical worlds.”

Draw From Within is a truly modern work, full of pace, variety and unconventional elements, enabling its diverse cast of dancers to showcase their individual talents.

Rambert Draw from Within is at The Lowry from 6-8 October 2021.

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The show opens with PreSentinent, created by choreographer Wayne McGregor for the Rambert in 2002. Full of powerful, athletic and often erotic moves, the dancers curve around each other’s bodies in a contortion of demanding poses. Both male and female dancers wear the same underwear-like costumes of lilac pants and tunic, illuminated by bold strips of lighting. The music by double Grammy award-winner, Steve Reich, is a harsh electronic sound that at times because of amplification sounds recorded, although it is live with four musicians two playing violin, one on viola and one on cello in the orchestra pit.

The string quartet is what links these three pieces closely, but the lack of variation in musical sounds is a downside to the evening, which gives all three works a slight feeling of sameness.

Marion Motin’s new piece, Rouge, comes second on the bill and is visually arresting. In her earlier career as a dancer, Motin performed with Madonna on her MDNA world tour in 2012, and the pop influence comes through strongly here in Motin’s choreography. Composer Micka Luna adds an electric guitar and percussion to the string quartet. Guitarist Rubén Martinez is central to the onstage performance, steeped in theatrical smoke which shrouds his feet and bellows from his hat.

The programme notes for the piece ask: ‘When your building is burning in the middle of the night what do you take with you?’ The dancers rise from the floor dressed like 1970s clubbers rather than sleepers, wearing an eclectic mix of fur coats and feather boas. They rise and fall back to the ground as if drugged, discarding much of their clothing along the way.

The dancers then enter what Motin calls the red zone, where bold lighting effects paint the dancers the rouge of the title. Neon strips frame the dances in what feels like a dystopian club where the clientele are giving it everything – dancing for their lives almost. Strobe lighting adds to the often frantic nature of the piece but unfortunately also make it challenging to watch because of the lengthy and continued strobe effects. That said, it was a definite winner with the audience at The Lowry, eliciting a spontaneous rise of energy in the audience and energised applause.

The final piece, is Hofesh Shechter’s 2007 work ‘In Your Rooms’, which he both choreographed and composed. The musicians – a trio of strings and percussion – are on stage throughout, on a raised platform that appears like a floating geometric window. Shechter creates an effective symmetry between the movement of the musicians, particularly the percussionists, and the dancers. He also makes use of voice over and projection which still has a provocative edge of political rebellion in its message of freedom of expression, mixed with mechanical movements and violent air punching.

It rounds off an evening of technically brilliant dance from one of the country’s leading contemporary dance companies.

Rambert’s triple bill is at The Lowry, Salford Quays from 30 October to 1 November 2019.

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This season the contemporary dance company brings its first full-length narrative dance work in almost 40 years. In all aspects – choreography, costumes, music, design – it is an ambitious exploration of the artistic imagination.

The two-act piece, takes inspiration from Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s 17th century play of the same name. The original play tells the story of Prince Segismundo who after a lifetime of incarceration escapes the prison confines for one day. On discovering everything he’s never had, the Prince is overwhelmed with negative emotions of greed, resentment and anger. He goes on a rampage of violence before being captured, sedated and re-imprisoned. On waking he’s told his experiences were all a dream and begins to wonder what is real and what is illusion.

With similarities to the biography of the Buddha, the Prince comes to realise that everything he longs for is to be found within himself. When given a second chance of freedom he approaches his release this time with appreciation and wonder.
In Rambert’s version, two-time Olivier award-winning choreographer, Kim Brandstrup mixes elements of the story with the isolation and repression of Eastern European artists during the Cold War.

Here the Prince becomes a theatre director, although if you haven’t read the synopsis he could just as easily be a writer or any artist working to create something from within. We meet him seated at a desk on which a single lamp shines most of the light. Slumping forward he drifts off to sleep, and images from the day’s rehearsals are replayed by the company dancers as if in a dream.

Costume Designer, Holly Waddington has used X-ray images of ancient costumes from the V&A museum as a basis for some of the prints. These are combined with styles from both the 17th century and 1950s, taking commonalities such as the scooped necklines, to create a sense of blurring time. The effect is an ethereal quality that almost camouflages the dancers against the muted grey/green back-drop of the Quay Brothers’ set design. On top of this are projected monochrome glimpses of the outside world – open land and seascapes; trees and windswept grasses.

Performed to a haunting score from Polish composer, Witold Lutosławski, all elements combine successfully to create a dream-like experience. Yet, while this works as an immersive artistic exploration it doesn’t draw in the audience in quite the same way.

The dancing is as technically brilliant and beautiful as ever, but aside from the solo and duet dances in the second act, there is often no clear focus to which the audience’s attention is drawn. The second act is also not distinctly drawn from the first, and the dream-like state the whole piece induces didn’t so much draw me into its world as create a pleasant backdrop to retreat into my own day-dreaming.

★ ★ ★

Life is a Dream is at The Lowry, Salford Quays from 10-12 October 2018

Read our interview with Kim Brandstrup and Holly Waddington.

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A prince, locked away from birth because of his father’s nightmares, encounters the world. A director in a repressive society unlocks his performers’ imaginations. These are the threads that fed Kim Brandstrup’s imagination as he began to devise Life is a Dream for Rambert.

Brandstrup’s initial inspirations were musical and visual – Lutoslawski’s turbulent music, and images of experimental postwar Polish theatre which, he tells me, ‘became the filter through which I listened to the music.’ The composer and avant-garde theatremakers like Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor all pursued their craft in the grey depths of the cold war. Their access to the wider world was severely restricted, so they mined their own creativity. ‘These artists in the eastern bloc were imprisoned in many ways,’ Brandstrup says, ‘dreaming about the world beyond, yet they did fabulous things. I’m not promoting artistic suffering but, somehow, something wonderful came out of this.’

The archive images that snared Brandstrup included some from Grotowksi’s landmark 1965 production of The Constant Prince. Another Calderón play with an imprisoned hero, it famously ended with his death, undercut by joyous laughter, at once anguished and defiant. This led Brandstrup to another Calderón play, Life is a Dream, and to his frequent design collaborators, the Brothers Quay.

American artists with an eastern-European sensibility, the Quays see the world through a singularly surreal lens. Their films bring inanimate objects to uncanny life; their stage designs edge towards dreams and nightmares. Here, they’ve designed ‘a derelict 1959 rehearsal room,’ as Brandstrup describes it. A director rehearses Life is a Dream, working with three parallel casts. In the second half of the production he enters the story himself.

Costume designer, Holly Waddington became absorbed in both the 1959 setting and the 1635 of Calderón’s play. ‘There is a correlation between the two periods,’ she explains. ‘17th-century dress is really peculiar. We made patterns up from the Victoria & Albert museum, only to realise they were completely unflattering, and not at all complementary to Kim’s movement. We’ve tempered them so that they work for dance and melded them with shapes of the 1950s.’

Waddington also closely observed Rambert’s dancers. ‘Dancers are really specific about what they wear in rehearsal. They’ve arrived at very clear decisions and know their physicality, so we’ve tried to harness that.’ Another breakthrough was her discovery that the V&A had begun to x-ray historic costumes to reveal their construction. ‘You see through intriguing layers of scrim and boning. They’re like ghostly shells, incredibly poetic.’ These images chimed with the skeleton-haunted vanitas paintings of the Spanish baroque, and excited all of the collaborators. ‘This idea of x-raying, excavating the past unlocked something,’ says Brandstrup, ‘about how to deal with the walls of this room – how you could see or get through them, to another time, to the other side.’

Calderón’s tragicomedy, only rarely performed in Britain, is an anguished fairy-tale, a spiritual allegory and a uniquely theatrical metaphor about illusion. How do you convey all that to the dancers, and make it live? ‘Dancers are not actors,’ says Brandstrup, ‘so you have to draw on who they are and how they move.’ He didn’t begin by talking about the play or his ideas (‘it sounds so abstract, it’s patronising’). ‘I feel that everything has to come out of what they do in the room. That’s where it happens.’ And for all his preparation, he says, ‘the most fabulous thing is when someone misunderstands something and completely surprises you. You long for those happy accidents.’

In the first half of the piece, three different casts repeat and mirror the action – something that Brandstrup says he has longed to do, and that fits the structure of Lutoslawki’s fourth symphony. ‘We present all this material in different versions so that you can understand it when it happens in the second half.’ The floor and costumes too are subtly mirrored. ‘We worked with metallic mesh,’ Waddington says, ‘slightly translucent. It will be quite subliminal, but we’re striving for this tilted language – everything’s dreamlike.’

A defining garment in rehearsals was a straightjacket – controlling a character whose impulses aren’t trusted. ‘The process was to distil this rather strange story into physical action,’ Brandstrup explains ‘The straightjacket offered a lack of hands to grab and hold the world. Then suddenly the character is released and wants to seize everything, touches too much. And ultimately waits to be touched rather than touching. You try to reduce it to what can happen between two people, then elaborate around that.’

For Brandstrup, the core of the story is the prince’s arduous journey. ‘There’s something about this man, who’s been restrained for so long and dreams about getting everything he always wanted,’ he reflects. ‘He’s full of feeling, he thinks he’s owed the world. Then he gives it up because he can’t have it.’ It resonates for Brandstrup on both an artistic and personal level. ‘You dream about all the things you could have, but getting them is not always necessary. It’s the dreaming, the desiring that is important – getting up every day to make and find something.’

Life is a Dream is at The Lowry, Salford Quays from 10-12 October 2018.

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It helps that Rambert is now on the GCSE and A-level dance syllabus. But as anyone who sat through a production of the Scottish play as a teenager will tell you, studying it and enjoying it are two very different things. Here the teenagers were clearly transfixed.

There is something wonderful about seeing young people’s imagination being captured by what for many is considered high art. In this triple bill Rambert does what it does best – gives the audience a taste of something new, something a bit more abstract, and a high-octane piece to leave everyone wishing they could jump on the stage and join in.

Flight, by Polish choreographer Malgorzata Dzierzon was premiered at The Lowry on Wednesday, and is one of five new pieces commissioned to celebrate the company’s 90^th year. Previously a dancer with the company, Dzierzon instinctively knows what works and has created a semi-autobiographical piece which explores ideas of boundaries and borders, migration and movement, familiarity and anonymity, and sometimes the sheer chaos of city living, with often jerky and frenetic movements. Solo, paired and company dancing is combined with multi-media projections and a stone backdrop that breaks and slides to form a constantly shifting environment, accompanied by the Rambert orchestra, with soloists on the piano (Yshani Perinpanayagam) and violin (Christopher Tombling).

The second piece, Frames, choreographed by Alexander Whitely, takes a similar transitory theme as it contrasts the ephemeral nature of dance with the permanence of the metal structures with which the dancers frame their movements. It’s an athletic piece for the dancers, with some extraordinary backward bends.

The titled piece, A Linha Curva, by Itzik Galili, brings the evening to a riotous finale. Premiered in 2009, it’s easy to see why it’s still a highlight of the company’s repertoire.

You can imagine the squeals from the audience when the male dancers come running on in black silk vests and fluorescent speedos. The vibrant costumes are matched by a colourful, flashing lighting grid. For this dance a four-piece percussion band is visible, raised up at the back of the stage. Dancers whiz across the floor on skateboards. The whole stage is alive with a Latin-American vibe and, although meticulously choreographed, the movement appears free and joyous.

A Linha Curva is cheeky, sexy, funny, and the nearest thing to a carnival you’ll ever get without being at one. The audience went wild, and I’ve no doubt that if the school kids forget everything else about their dance studies they’ll remember this.

Rambert: A Linha Curva is at The Lowry from 28 September to 1 October 2016.

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