Isadora Now: Triple Bill review, Barbican Theatre – A stylish, thoughtful and bold production

★★★★☆

Viviana Durante’s celebration of Isadora Duncan evokes her as a radical artist and present-day influence. It’s a stylish, thoughtful programme that reaches from recreations of Duncan’s own dances to a bold new work by Joy Alpuerto Ritter, danced with imposing force.

Durante, former Royal Ballet ballerina, has a knack for uncovering dance history. Her Kenneth MacMillan programme made a strong case for the choreographer’s very early works; now she’s turned to a much earlier figure. With her bare feet and flowing draperies, Isadora Duncan was an international sensation in the Edwardian era, a modern dance pioneer who also had a huge influence on ballet.

Though she created many dances and founded several schools, not much of Duncan’s choreography survives. This all-female programme opens with her Dance of the Furies, created as a solo in 1911 and later revised for a larger cast.

Five women move around a bowl of flame, surging into lines and poses to music by Gluck. The movements are angular, but what stands out is the fluid, muscular power of the dancing, the rippling freedom of bare limbs. Fabiana Piccioli’s lighting bathes the stage in fiery gold.

Frederick Ashton’s lyrical Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan was based on his own teenaged memories of seeing her dance, more than 50 years earlier. Replacing an injured Durante, Begoña Cao gave a sweeping performance, not helped by a clumsy piano accompaniment.

Joy Alpuerto Ritter made her name as a dancer in Akram Khan’s Until the Lions, which showcased her fierce concentration and physicality. As a choreographer, she’s already shown interest in early modern dancers. Her new Unda is created on a grander scale, with a cast of six women and a sense of the Barbican’s wide stage.

It opens with a woman running. Duncan’s skipping run is both airy and grounded: the dancer bounces upwards with the weight of gravity behind her, playful or heroic. Ritter’s women run like sprinters, covering ground. They’ve got somewhere to be, something to do. Winding through a cello score, composed and played live by Lih Qun Wong, the women wash across the stage like water, regather as if for a ritual, surge onwards.

Ritter’s dancers seem almost in dialogue with their own bodies. In one solo, it’s as if Ritter is being swept in different directions by different parts of herself. The others are consumed in different ways, the experience shared but always individual.