Cristal Pite and Kidd Pivot

An extraordinary evening at Sadler's Wells. Cristal Pite has been a dancer and choreographer since she was very young, now working with her own company, Kidd Pivot. She worked for some years with the Forsythe company, therefore at the most cerebral, physical and imaginative edge of dance, so that's the tradition of her own company.

'Lost Action' is one piece that lasts nearly 90 minutes without a break, and it didn't seem over long. For a start she and her dancers are extraordinarily supple, and to watch human bodies with that degree of flexibility moving is wonderful. When we watch movement we are involved in it, we follow it in our own bodies. & the choreography was very inventive with movement.

& the 'sense' of the piece? I guess it would be 'death and the dancer', because it's 'about' a dancer and death. The death is relived, replayed, worked around, re-imagined in a variety of circumstances on a bare stage, just in dance. Finally it's as if the dancers just have to accept it. Finally, after an extraordinarily intense male/female pas-de-deux, there's a motionless (male) body that can be lifted, turned, held, carried, but remains motionless.

An amazing feat of memory by the dancers, too, given the complexities of the movements. The sound track is a sound collage, sometimes overlapping voices, beats, just sound, little to jog the memory. I guess there's a sequence to the movements, each phrase leading to the next. A 90-minute choreography. (I'd have problems learning a three-minute choreography, not that I've ever tried, needed or wanted to... But perhaps learning choreographies is a way to develop the memory for movement.)

I wished the lighting wasn't so low throughout. The moving bodies said so much I wanted to see them as clearly as possible.

She's here, talking about her work and rehearsing with the Nederlands Dans Theater. And the Sadler's Wells trailer for 'Lost Action' is here.

I think there's something here for the tango community too: the more supple you are the easier it is to move, and suppleness can be improved. The 'milonguero' community might not pay much attention to stretching exercises, but if you watch the older dancers it is surprising how supple they still are. Impossible to say whether that's because they've danced so much, or whether they've danced so much because they are naturally supple; a bit of both, probably. But if you're not naturally bendy, it's worth trying to do something about it, because bendy people are likely to dance a lot better and look a lot better than stiff people.