Rooster: Something to crow about

BERNADETTE RAE talks to the choreographer of a visiting British dance company nurtured from firm foundations laid bythe eminent Madame Marie Rambert.

Christopher Bruce's Rooster is a boisterous piece of contemporary choreography set to songs by the Rolling Stones. Billed as "perhaps the most popular contemporary dance work ever created," it is more, says Bruce, than a snappy, sexy celebration of the 1960s.

"There is a seriousness underlining the work. Male chauvinism was, in the 60s, at its very worst. Rooster looks at that with humour and irony. The metaphor is of man as the red rooster, the cockerel, preening his finery and out on the town, while the women look on, totally aghast.

"In all my work I can never quite resist the serious vein."

The choreographer is also artistic director of Rambert Dance Company, which visits Australia and New Zealand next week for the first time since its landmark tour of 1948.

Bruce is often credited with the successful revival of the company, originally called Ballet Rambert, which came about when founder Marie Rambert made the radical decision in 1966 to broaden the scope of what had been a strictly classical touring company to include a contemporary repertoire. Bruce emerged as a leading dancer and, soon after, as a choreographer of distinctive talent.

He was the last of the young choreographers nurtured by Madame Rambert. Tudor, Ashton, Cranko and Morrice were among her earlier proteges.

The survival of Rambert as Britain's leading dance troupe has depended largely on the choreography and guidance of Bruce, whose expressionistic style and eclectic dance vocabulary drawing from ballet, social dances, Graham technique, folk dance and his own idiosyncratic physicality have proved endearing and remarkably enduring.

But neither Rambert nor Bruce has deserted the classical form of dance in any way, he insists.

"We utilise all the techniques we need to carry on a repertory system, and we do all the major work, a huge variety of work, from a point of absolute technical integrity."

Three representative Bruce works make up Rambert's Australia and New Zealand tour programme.

"My work is simply based on my life," he says, "on what I experience or come to know about through reading literature and the newspaper, and from watching TV. I am vitally interested in the world, politically, socially and philosophically."

A basic theme has emerged, which he describes simply as "man's inhumanity to man."

Ghost Dances from 1981, which will be performed here, is a typically political work, paying tribute to the innocent victims of oppression in South America, but set to jubilant Andean folk music.

Rooster was created a decade later. The third piece on tour is Meeting Point, with music by Michael Nyman (who composed the score for the film The Piano). It was made for the United Dance Festival, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the United Nations in 1995.

It speaks, says Bruce, of the difficulty of bringing together people or nations. If that sounds like serious stuff, the overall tone of the touring programme is one of celebration, says Bruce.

"There is the celebration of the human spirit over adversity, a slightly critical celebration of the Jagger-ish 60s - and celebration, too, of Rambert's return to the South Pacific.

For the company it has been a long, hard winter, with a heavy workload.

"The dancers really deserve this tour," says Bruce. "After all, it has been 53 years."

That initial tour had a considerable impact. Not only were the audiences of 1948 impressed and enchanted by what they saw on stage, a number of the Rambert dancers were also smitten by what they saw here and the company returned to England several members short.

The "defectors," says Bruce, proved a vital seeding for dance here, by giving a definitive boost to the teaching establishments of the day.

"The legacy in Australia was incredible."

Teaching standards in Australia and New Zealand remain high, he says, and Rambert boasts three or four dancers who began their careers in Australia and New Zealand. One of brightest talents of the past decade, Amy Hollingsworth, who trained in Australia but performed with the Royal New Zealand Ballet after graduation, is among the expats who return here with Rambert Company.

Bruce's own beginnings in dance have a Billy Elliott feel.

"I was an 11-year-old in Northern England, from a very working class background," he says. "But in my case it was my parents who suggested ballet classes. I had polio as a child and I loved sports. My parents knew the local dancing teacher, and thought it could help straighten my legs."

He went on to train at the Rambert School and joined Ballet Rambert in 1963, aged 18.

His first choreographic work was done for Ballet Rambert in 1969, when he was 24. A variety of titles have been bestowed on him at Rambert, and he spread his creative wings, too, working with the English National Ballet, Nederlands Dans Theater, the Royal Danish Ballet, Cullberg Ballet and Houston Ballet.

He has been the recipient of a number of prestigious awards, culminating in the Evening Standard Award for Outstanding Artistic Achievement in Ballet in 1996 and being made a CBE in the Queen's 1998 Birthday Honours.

He has no predictions for the future of dance beyond the importance of "certain truths." The necessity for strong technique is his first. Being true to the creative self and making only work that is honest is the second.

"It is getting more and more difficult for young choreographers," he says, "because so much has already been done. That creates pressure on them to approach their work in a more superficial way - to look for effects, to strive for success.

"But you can never know what will be successful, what will have an effect.

"You just have to make the work that needs to be made at the time and let it be."

* Rambert Dance Company performs at the Aotea Centre in Auckland from March 21 to 24.