Resolution 2012, The Place - review

The reader should ignore the star-rating at the top of this review: it really doesn't tell the full story of a six-week season of 78 new works by young, inexperienced choreographers, with every night completely different from the one before.

Resolution! is all about the search for new talent - a gold rush enterprise in which the (very) occasional glimmer makes up for a seeming eternity of frustration, cramp and the gradual onset of madness.

In its 23-year existence, Resolution! has been a launchpad for Wayne McGregor, now one of the most fêted choreographers in the world, and Javier de Frutos, whose The Most Incredible Thing with the Pet Shop Boys was the crossover hit of last year; as well as Katie Prince, Hofesh Shechter and many more of the big names of British dance.

It's hardly surprising that the opening night of the current season offered no hint of that kind of potential but there are still more than 70 new faces to go.

With luck there'll be more of an emphasis among them on creating steps, and less on devising skits. In the 30-plus minutes that it took to get through Ticket Dance Theatre's Scratched and Eleanor Sikorski's Chocolate there were maybe 10 minutes of cabaret material struggling to get out.

Chocolate was the definition of a show that was more fun to perform than to watch, with Sikorski finding a range of tricksy ways to ingest the stuff before agitating up a cloud of cocoa powder that hung around her head like an edible nimbus.

Scratched took the promising idea of a bunch of backstage staff forced to improvise a dance when the performers fail to show, and then scattered it in all directions, with steel band music, tap, tango and a game of follow-my-leader.

Choreographer Lexi Bradburn seems to have the attention span of a cat in a zoetrope.

Full marks at least to Holly Noble's chutzpah in using Mozart's Requiem for Fawn, performed by her own AD Dance Company. Making classical ballets outside the umbrella of a major institution must feel like pushing rocks up Everest anyway, so why not go for broke with an impossible score? And there at last, in the Kyrie Eleison, Noble brought out a tenderness between Emma Fisher and Oliver Wraith, a solicitous shepherding of each other through this overwhelming piece of music that was a quantum leap from anything else in the whole evening.

Until February 17 (020 7121 1100, theplace.org.uk)

Resolution 2012
The Place
17 Duke's Road
WC1H 9PY