Among the young English groups that emerged in the 90s, the Ricochet Dance Company, founded in 1989 by dancers Kate Gowar and Karin Potisk, has an unusual structure for a group that works on contemporary dance. It is not directed by a choreographer, but is building a repertoire of creations by new names in English dance. Kate Gowar and Karin Potisk commission two works per season, giving the Company the opportunity to explore, year after year, different approaches to movement. Three choreographers are involved in the double program hosted by Oriente Occidente: Wayne Mc Gregor, Javier De Frutos and Rosemary Lee. Director of the Random Dance Company, Wayne Mc Gregor, currently resides at the Place Theatre in London, a key space for the development of contemporary English choreography. Urban Savage is a piece for five dancers that aims to explore the relationship between vulnerability and aggression, desire and the impossibility of contact. Famous for performing naked solos on hot topics, Javier De Frutos – one of the hottest names on the young London scene, who grew up in New York with Laura Dean’s Company – has created two pieces with captivating presuppositions for the Ricochet Dance Company. The first, E Muoio Disperato, winner of the 1992 Bagnolet Competition, was based on the third act of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca and is a piece that proclaims itself “not suitable for children”. Sex, love, jealousy and death are the main themes of this extravagant tale, in which even kissing becomes a choreographic inspiration. With All visitors bring happiness, some by coming, some by going, De Frutos has instead chosen to revisit a twentieth-century title that has already been tackled by Aurelio Milloss, Jerome Robbins, Maurice Béjarat, Jiri Kylian, Reinhild Hoffmann and Angelin Preljocaj. This is Les Noces by Igor Stravinsky, an oratorio dedicated to the description of the social rite of a Russian peasant wedding, choreographed for the first time in 1923 by Bronislava Nijinska. Javier De Frutos approaches Stravinsky’s story and score with extreme freedom, signing, as The Times decrees, “30 minutes of choreography as furious as a sexual act”. Rosemary Lee, author of Treading the Night Plain, alternates her activity as a solo dancer with the creation of group choreography linked to particular settings (a ruined abbey for Haughmond Dances, a tire warehouse for Ascending Fields). Treading the Night Plain (’97) is her first piece for the Ricochet Company. It is a sort of study on the relationship between light and the body, which draws inspiration from the music of the American composer Terry Riley.
