King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, 9/11/26
RB Dance Company
Artistic Director and Choreographer: Romain Rachline Borgeaud
It’s still a thrill to be back in the sparklingly refurbished King’s Theatre, beneath John Byrne’s colourful ceiling painting “All the World’s a Stage”, for an evening of dance.
RB Dance Company was founded in France in 2018 by Romain Rachline Borgeaud to explore and celebrate dance at the intersection of tap, urban jazz, and percussion. And what a busy intersection it is. Twice finalists on ‘France’s Got Talent’ and boasting a huge European following, this was the company’s first visit to Scotland: judging by the reaction of the rapturous audience in the packed auditorium it won’t be the last.
This was my first experience of tap dance apart from occasionally seeing Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, and Gene Kelly on the small screen, usually in black and white. ‘Stories’ is very different. Premiered in France in 2019, it tells of Icarus, a rising Hollywood actor caught under the brooding, obsessive influence of a powerful film director. The name Icarus hints that there isn’t going to be a happy ending and gives us a clue as to his downward and ultimately tragic story arc. The Director is a Fate-like character, intervening to change the course of events for good or ill. There’s a doomed love affair, naturellement. Rachline Borgeaud conceived the idea for ‘Stories’ and wrote, staged, composed, and choreographed the show (in that order) but with movement constantly in mind.
The industrial set design by Federica Mugnai is impressive: dancers move individual parts of the scenery to portray different locations: newsroom, hotel, casino, dark alley, film set, subway. Several staircases offer opportunities for the story to be danced on different levels, even with the scenery in motion. Bold, monochrome lighting by Alex Hardlett enhances the dramatic atmosphere, and elegant costumes by Margaux Ponsard allow the dancers to move unimpeded while conveying the mood of a 1950s film noir.
There’s gambling, loving, knifing, imprisonment, fleeing, and filming. The plot can sometimes seem a little chaotic: which scenes are real and which are a film? Why does Icarus have asthma? Who cares? We’re not here for multi-layered drama, but for the dance. And there’s plenty of that, with non-stop dancing to propulsive, insistent rhythms. The emotion and volume is turned up to 10.
Choreography is mostly big numbers with all nine dancers dominating the stage, plus the occasional pas de deux: Icarus and his lover; Icarus and the Director. It’s a heady combination of tap and many different styles. There’s a possibility tap purists might feel short changed, but it’s unlikely. The recorded soundtrack is influenced by jazz, honky tonk, rock and roll, and hip hop.
‘Stories’ was an excellent evening’s entertainment. Rachline Borgeaud cites Gene Kelly as a seminal influence. Kelly, with his love of contemporary dance and his passion for France, would be proud.
Photo credit: Aline Gérard
