Donald Hutera
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Last week the new Spring Dance season at the Coliseum, a joint presentation of Askonas Holt, Raymond Gubbay and Sadler’s Wells, brought us Carlos Acosta alongside a raft of pals from the Royal Ballet. This week, as the season comes to a close, Acosta is back and sharing the spotlight with members of Dánza Contemporanea de Cuba, the company that featured in his popular full-length production Tocororo. The result is a considerable improvement on the misguided bill he headlined at the Wells last October with artists from Ballet Nacional de Cuba.
Yolanda Correa, a principal dancer from the latter company, helps to kick this new evening into high gear. She and Acosta are crisply paired in the pas de deux from Alicia Alonso’s 1988 staging of Don Quixote. Correa is confidence incarnate, while his brand of buttery bravura sets the heart aquiver in awed delight.
Although the remainder of the first act fails to yield similar thrills, it is not without interest. La Ecuación is the first of two works by George Céspedes, a leading member of Dánza Contemporanea. Premiered at last year’s Manchester International Festival, this quick quartet is sculpted in and around a cube-shaped metal frame. Angular yet undulant dancers in loose, bright-coloured trousers and sleeveless tops spring about to a commissioned percussive score by the acclaimed Cuban pop musician Alfonso X. The abstract geometry of their movement carries a dynamic charge.
Wednesday’s performance also saw the world premiere of Céspedes’s El peso de una isla (“The Weight of an Island”), an ambitious work about the pressure-cooked rhythms of contemporary Cuban identity. Fourteen dancers, Acosta included, in stylised street clothes race, grab and tumble to another pulsating soundtrack by Alfonso X. The juicy discipline that fuels their pellmell energy is admirable, but the piece itself is repetitive and overlong.
The entire second act is devoted to Tocororo Suite, an unsatisfyingly truncated retread of a show that had its UK debut at the Wells in 2003. Acosta is an engaging country bumpkin pitted against Alexander Varona’s limber caricature of a cigar-smoking city slicker. But despite their efforts, and those of the supporting ensemble and a live five-piece band, the requisite party atmosphere never came to a genuine boil on opening night.
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