‘Not touching is the worst!’: Rambert embrace a different kind of dance | Rambert

Arriving at Rambert’s smart HQ on London’s South Bank, I’m immediately led to the loading bay where a trestle table is set up with the accessories du jour: hand sanitiser, masks, disposable gloves, and an infrared thermometer to be aimed at any forehead coming through the door. It’s the performance that has started every day for Rambert’s company of dancers since they got back in the studio eight weeks ago.

Upstairs in the studio, things are familiar, but different. Before rehearsals could begin again, the whole company, including production and technical teams, were tested for Covid-19. Then the dancers were separated into bubbles of four, all working in different studios with video link-ups between them. In this unconventional set-up, the Belgian choreographer Wim Vandekeybus has created a new work, Draw from Within, premiering at the end of the month. Rather than taking place on stage, it will be performed in all the spaces of Rambert’s building, from the stairwells to the studios to the roof, and streamed live to the audience online, in a one-off, real-time show.

For Rambert’s first post-lockdown work, artistic director Benoit Swan Pouffer deliberately didn’t want to film a stage performance that would just remind audiences what they were missing out on. Draw from Within is devised for screen (Vandekeybus has form as a film-maker as well as a choreographer of often explosive and experimental dance theatre) with the camera sometimes in the thick of the action, as if it’s a character itself. “We’re creating an experience you cannot have in the theatre,” says Pouffer.

The piece is going to be “fantastical, sometimes nightmarish, sometimes filled with hope”, continues Pouffer. Vandekeybus himself talks about mysteriousness and celebration, strength and weakness, blood, ritual and smoke all being elements that have gone into the fabric of the work. “For me personally, I see this pattern of the cycle of light and darkness, life, death and rebirth,” says dancer Simone Damberg Würtz.

It’s not a show about Covid, but it’s hard not to be influenced by the times we’re in, whether that’s in the creation of the work or the audience’s interpretation. I watch two dancers stretch towards each other, bodies forming an arch with their fingers quivering, almost touching, but unable to connect. We all know what that feels like.

Dancers are typically very tactile people and the no-touching rule is getting to them. “It’s the worst thing!” says dancer Liam Francis. He’s missing the hugs, but also the feeling of physically working with other bodies. Some of the dancers live together so they don’t have the same restrictions. “You see people dancing together and you want to have that touch, have someone’s weight and their sweat dripping on you,” laughs Francis.

Other practical rules, they’ve got used to – such as dancing in masks. “I got very tired at the beginning,” says Damberg Würtz, “because you’re not getting the same amount of air, you get out of breath quicker. My friend said, ‘You’re going to be in super shape at the end of this because it’s like being in altitude training.’”

The company are itching to get back to performing. “One of our colleagues was watching one day and she said there was so much energy, quite aggressive energy,” says Damberg Würtz. “I don’t feel angry when I’m doing it, but we haven’t been dancing fully for months, so I think that’s spilling into it. It’s powerful.”

That sense of release could be part of the experience for the audience too, Vandekeybus hopes. “Catharsis is very important,” he says. “In dance, we don’t have to give a big message to the world, we just have to make people feel something that maybe they might have forgotten.”