THINGS have certainly come together, rather well, since the Curve Foundation faced up to a free preview (earlier this month) with one man injured and some loose choreographic ends in need of tidying. Now, with the company back up to strength - and with the lighting plot fully in place, too - there's plenty of opportunity to register the clever play Cooper makes, not just with his dancers' bodies (in their minimal, clingy black), but with the music and indeed the space.
In two out of three works - Popular Songs and David Bowie's Diamond Dogs - Cooper teases our likely familiarity with the music by creating his own flow of linear rhythms: sometimes the movement seems to oppose the musical phrasing, sometimes it seems to flirt with it. There's no attempt at literal rendition, but often a gesture, or a sudden juxtapositioning of bodies will catch, then release, the meaning of a line, a lyric.
Like Soraya Ham's frisky little pas-de-chats expressing the girly-girly allure in Marilyn Monroe's I Wanna Be Loved By You, or the way in which she and Rebekah Stokoe together capture the underlying slither of decadence in Bowie while dipping in and out of classic ballet steps.
Luckily he and his five exceptional dancers are so thoroughly worked and toned that they can follow through his challenging, split-second shifts of dynamic, his quirky angularities and - as in the fine duet, When Disturbed, Then Disturbed - point up the mercurial invention that dislocates conventional movement and re-figures it. This particular duet has, however, a sense of focus and cohesion that is less obvious in the other pieces where separate songs occasion individual vignettes that don't really join up - but given the quality of performance, and the promise in the choreography, this is a minor drawback, a reminder that Cooper's talent is still emerging and taking shape. On this showing he, and his company, have a lot to offer. Repeated tonight at Edinburgh's Assembly Rooms.
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