THE PREMIERE

On Tuesday I went to the opening night of choreographer Ella Winter's new dance show. The work was produced in collaboration with a linguist, a landscape designer, a heart surgeon and an architect. The score, by Antonio Prandini, samples Italian folk songs and their lyrics. There is a minimalist set – white boxes – incorporating a video installation. And there are Winter's eight dancers.

The dance involves mechanical-looking repeated-action sequences and a running montage of mimed laughs, whistles, hissing breaths, and twists of the feet. At times, the dancers enact the lyrics of the songs - there are brief fragments of duet – but long sections are difficult to understand or merely banal. Many hands, on this occasion, had not made light work.

At times, I found myself musing on Winter's collaborators. According to Winter, they had given her and her dancers different objectives, and each had brought a method of expression which had not been available to the dancers before. No doubt, but it's hard to view the result, as Winter claims, as something unique in the sphere of contemporary dance. I've been an admiring spectator of Winter as both dancer and choreographer for over 30 years now, but I felt subtly defeated by the show. For me, it seemed a private conversation with a like-minded few. You had to be wearing very strong contemporary-dance goggles to make anything of it.