Dancing to a new beat

There's an apocryphal story about how, when Montreal dance troupe La La La Human Steps brought their signature show Human Sex to Kentish Town's Town and Country Club, one broadsheet dance critic was so disturbed by the mosh pit of rock'n'rollers she found herself confronted with that she refused to get out of her cab and spend any time watching the show.

La La La's director Édouard Lock laughs at the memory of the Town and Country story. I didn't think anyone knew about that. The funny thing was we didn't think what we were doing was shocking and it really wasn't our intention to be seen as aggressive - we were just doing something that felt real to us. It's hard to imagine people getting so shocked these days.' Shocking certainly isn't the first word that springs to mind in connection with Amjad - the show that marks La La La's return to London for the first time in eight years. Sleek, sensual and stylish are nearer the mark for a creation that finds Lock reaching right back beyond his Eurocrash days to the roots of his dance training. With echoes of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty seeping through the soundtrack, Lock has chosen to join forces with ballet.

There is a twist, though: he's put a man in pointe shoes, the traditional domain of the ballerina. It's been done before, by William Forsythe for one, but in Lock's hands, it adds an intriguing ambiguity to a show that, for all its surface sheen and high design aesthetics, takes a pointed look at gender roles. The man on pointe? To me it's not a big deal, although so many people seem to pick up on it,' says Lock. The pointe technique is an interesting one and it's not got male or female written all over it.
I don't see why women should have
a stranglehold on it – it's really all about training and opportunity.'

This is something born out by the fact that Amjad features a solitary male pointe dancer, the strikingly elegant Dominic Santia, in a cast of four men and five women. That's because he's the only one who can do it. But he didn't have years of training. He just naturally had the right physique and correct feet for it.'
Santia's duet with statuesque ballerina Zofia Tujaka is one of Amjad's highlights and it's worth noting that without the pointe shoes she'd tower over him. It reflects Amjad's sly reworking of the gender rule book - Lock chose the show's title because it's an Arabic term that refers to men or women.

You can read Amjad's dance power-plays, built around female-dominated duets, as a comment on the emasculation of men and the empowerment of women. One bare-chested male dancer has a question mark etched on his chest, almost as if he's querying his sense of his own identity. The reality, however, is rather less fancifully theoretical.

'It's funny you picked up on that,' chuckles Lock, 'because it's a real tattoo! The dancer and his girlfriend have all kinds of crazy tattoos, though they're not all grammatical. But when I saw it, I loved the sense of ambivalence it added - though it wasn't part of any plan.'

Lock, a cool and elegant 53-year-old, feels Amjad is another twist to an eclectic career, which has included collaborations with David Bowie (he directed the Sound And Vision tour) and Frank Zappa as well as an award-winning film version of his 2002 work Amelia, which came complete with lyrics by Lou Reed.

Working with such big hitters has given him the confidence to create Amjad, which doesn't so much rework Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty as riff on the emotions and memories stirred up by such familiar works. British composer Gavin Bryars, one of Amjad's three music credits, has melded Tchaikovsky's themes into a compelling patchwork score.

'People know the music without knowing where they know it from,' says Lock. 'It's all about emotional resonance - I wanted to reach back into the memory of the ballets without being a prisoner of the choreography.'

Isn't he just obeying the unwritten law of dance that every single choreographer has a Swan Lake in them, dying to get out? 'I don't know about that, but when I started out as a choreographer, ballet and modern dance didn't like each other very much. Now it's common to find a contemporary choreographer creating for a ballet company. The lines have been blurred.'

More to the point, he's relishing trying out pointe. 'I don't think I've got it out of my system. I'd like to do a whole male chorus on pointe - but they're pretty hard to find!'