Life is a Dream

Life is a Dream is the first full-length narrative work created for Rambert in almost 40 years, and well worth the wait. Brandstrup situates his strikingly original dance-drama in a warehouse rehearsal room, where an exhausted director is falling asleep…. To music by Witold Lutoslawski, wonderfully realised by the Rambert Orchestra, the director is visited by Calderón’s characters. They step from behind pillars and materialise from shadows, moth-grey in the half-light. Brandstrup’s movement language is contemporary, but deeply informed by balletic geometry. Tensile and steely, evanescent as ghosts, the Rambert dancers leap and whirl through a prison cell that is also, surely, the chamber of every artist’s imagination….. the realm Brandstrup conjures is an enthralling one.

Life Is a Dream is far closer to poetry than drama. It is inspired by Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s 17th-century play of the same title, but Brandstrup buries any semblance of plot to give free rein to imagery, mood and symbolism. Brandstrup’s choreography looks understated, but rewards attention. It is always finely composed and the dancing itself is richly inflected. Flurries of action catch the surges, spikes and trails of Witold Lutoslawski’s restless score (played live – a real treat), and the sinewy spirals, tilts and feints make the dancers feel as evasive as the shadows they cast. Brandstrup also makes a virtue of restraint. Stillness and absence are as integral as action and presence, and he can make small gestures such as curling up, holding still or turning away feel large with implication.

…an atmosphere that you can virtually drink. Brandstrup…. has here created a beguiling, vaguely nostalgic world that seems to exist just at the corner of one’s memories and perception, a flickering dreamscape with a dash of the silent movie about it. Deftly engineered projections allow strange images to flood the room without warning, and trees to rustle in the moonlight through the room’s windows, while sounds – at times, somewhere between waves breaking, electrical static and the soft crackle of a needle on vinyl – gently tease the ears.

…strongly scored, beautifully designed, inventively choreographed, silkily danced…. Brandstrup’s hybrid balletic language exploits the fluency and versatility of the Rambert artists with inventive duets, rolling falls and dizzy, off-kilter spins…

In Life is a Dream Brandstrup has created a work that speaks to all of Rambert’s many qualities, and one which, in its complexity, will go on unveiling new layers of meaning on second, third and fourth viewing. It is visually dazzling, intellectually stimulating, and emotionally gripping.

Reality and fantasy remain unsettlingly, dangerously blurred — it’s a pertinent modern message to distil from a 17th-century play.

Kim Brandstrup’s new evening-length work for Rambert is, in part, a meditation on the nature of creativity. At its heart is a theatre director who presides over a rehearsal of a play. In his fitful dreams, the performers and their roles intermingle until he no longer knows what is real and what he has imagined. Brandstrup’s movement language is balletically graceful and athletically powerful… The staging is gorgeous...