Draw from Within, Rambert, review: British dance makes a nightmarish, provocative, very welcome return

Draw from Within, the new piece by Rambert, is this country’s first substantial, all-new dance work for eight months. Depending on how you look at it, that is cause for either head-in-hands misery or hands-in-the-air jubilation, and it certainly puts a dance critic in an odd position: after crawling through a desert for the best part of a year, when you finally emerge and someone kindly offers you a steak and a glass of vino, aren’t you going to wolf both gratefully down, whether or not cut or vintage are necessarily your first “peacetime” choice?

In the event, this 70-minute, eclectically scored offering is very much the sort of thing you might expect of its creator, Belgian naughty boy Wim Vandekeybus. Nightmarish, cartoonish, silly, sleek, pretentious, provocative and all the rest, it’s essentially a tellingly-titled musing on where we all are now (work-starved dancers especially): still embroiled in the Covid crisis, desperate for old-fashioned physical interaction, and wondering which way is up.

Viewable online for £10 per household, it is, I’m promised, performed and streamed completely live, with the 19 dancers certainly using what feels like every nook and cranny of the company’s South Bank home. After an opening assurance of the rehearsals’ and performances’ Covid-proofed, bubblelicious credentials, the action proper launches on the roof, in what admittedly looked oddly twilit for a lunchtime premiere (though let’s put that down to cunning filming and move swiftly on). Two fellows deliver a brief, enjoyably peacockish little duet, whereupon everything suddenly goes dark and silent, and we’re swiftly down an unlovable stairwell, illuminated only by a pass-the-bottle-style succession of lit matches.

Here, with the scantily clad dancers’ movements suggesting complete spiritual breakdown, the sense is very much of a society driven into the shadows, close to insanity. In fact, in its concrete-lined, claustrophobic panic, and the grim detail of what looks like a just-removed internal organ being passed down the stairs, this passage has faint flashes of France-based filmmaker Gaspar Noë’s truly horrific 2018 dance-wrap-party-goes-to-hell film Climax, though things soon open out into a large, dimly lit space in which each member of a larger ensemble – none of them ever touching – elegantly marks out his or her space with the infinite evanescence of the smoke from a just-blown-out-match.

Soon, the dancers are either bashfully courting as if rediscovering such simple pleasures, or else supporting each other, cantilever-style, with long, elastic, perhaps veinlike ropes. And this latter sense of vascular obsession and insecurity returns in a later section, with each member of the large ensemble jaggedly pulsating like something close to giant ventricles, as if willing their own hearts to keep on beating.

There’s also a fair bit of sub-Pina Bausch, dance-theatrical self-indulgence (notwithstanding the spikily enjoyable touch of a “63kg baby” born wearing a disposable mask), along with unwelcome deviations into full-on Fringey foolishness. None of this does much to allay previous nerves about where Rambert is heading under extravagantly named new director Benoit Swan Pouffer.

But at least it’s heading somewhere. And my, is its new piece brilliantly danced: those 19 Rambertians perform like racehorses elated at having at long last been let out of the traps. As a reaction to the current global mayhem, Draw from Within – much as you inevitably crave to be part of a real, live audience  – is a daftly ambitious triumph of logistics and production, one that embraces the current restrictions rather than being cowed by them. And if it is also downright annoying in places – well, what could be more “now” than that?

Live-streaming daily until Sunday 27. Details: rambert.org.uk