Draw from Within, Sadler’s Wells, review: baffling, bizarre but simply beautiful dancing

Whether you think him a world-changing genius or the purveyor of pretentious tosh, there’s no denying that Wim Vandekeybus has exerted considerable influence over the world of modern dance. Working largely through his own company, Ultima Vez, this 55-year old Belgian choreographer has been a key pioneer of a style of work that has profoundly shaped the practices of younger toilers in the field.

Using an eclectic mix of music and speech and exploiting a wide range of free-wheeling and spasmodic movement, Vandekeybus and his disciples create incoherent narratives that are freighted with symbols and often violent and extreme in implication. Dance historians interpret this as a revisiting of the Expressionism widespread in Europe through the inter-war period.

Sculpted on Rambert’s troupe of 14 magnificently versatile and resourceful dancers, Draw from Within is Vandekeybus’s most recent creation, streamed last September online and now transferred to the stage. He doesn’t allow anyone to hold back, and the Rambert troupe obliges him with a thrilling mixture of shrieking, stripping, hitting, bashing and crashing and even improvising of dialogue. Lovers of classical elegance should steer clear, but the uninhibited expenditure of energy over Draw from Within’s 70-minute duration is astonishing and exhilarating.

But what’s it all about? The trouble is that the principle of a wilfully bonkers assemblage of random scenes and disconnected images seems passé today – dance fans have seen it all at least once too often, and nothing can shock us now. A younger wave of choreographers such as Crystal Pite, Wayne McGregor and Pam Tanowitz has pulled dance back to order, either by exploring a single theme or returning to a more disciplined focus on the human body.

Perhaps Vandekeybus has suffered the fate of all enfants terribles – he’s grown up to be a bit of a loud-mouthed bore. Yet Draw from Within is not only superbly performed but also immaculately presented. The lighting by Francis Gahide is exquisite, and the recorded soundtrack offers pleasures ranging from a poem by Ted Hughes about nothingness to some funky trumpet by the Romanian virtuoso Constantin Ghergina.

Finding a thread through the action, however, is less gratifying. The stage is bare, with only four butcher’s hooks hanging menacingly from the flies. Flamenco is being rehearsed in front of some mobile screens – a scene that returns at the conclusion. Then figures in priestly white robes or gym-slip underwear pass flares from one to another, ritually waving them in the air like children with sparklers. They seem to be torturers of some kind, victimising innocents as part of their cult.

After an orgiastic mass mating dance, a skein of cables is drawn across the stage, trapping and perhaps electrocuting a fly of a creature caught in their midst. A group now proceeds to paint crude images on large sheets of brown paper hung at the rear, while at an old-fashioned switchboard a woman takes messages largely in Russian and English. A baby is born – could this be a clue to the title Draw from Within?

The child turns out precocious, immediately tearing round on a tricycle, shooting his father dead and calling the switchboard operator to name himself. The scene changes to show long bleak corridors where a woman is forcibly instructed to lie on a camp bed and give birth to a pillow. Then it’s back to the flamenco before a peremptory blackout.

Are you with me? It means everything; or it means nothing; or it means what you want it to mean. And, frankly, if you can make sense of it, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

At Sadler’s Wells until Saturday. Info: sadlerswells.com. Then at the Mayflower, Southampton on June 25–26. Info: mayflower.org.uk