Cedar Lake Ballet Makes a Brief, Well-Chosen Stop at Sadler\'s Wells

LONDON-When Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet was founded in New York in 2003 by the Walmart heiress Nancy Laurie, it was generally regarded in the dance world as a rich woman's folly. Ms. Laurie hired dancers and a director, and later bought the photographer Annie Leibowitz's former studios and transformed them into a state-of-the-art black box theater, rehearsal and office space. But for a few years no one heard much about the company, and the naysayers muttered that Ms. Laurie would soon lose interest.

But on Thursday night, Cedar Lake opened a short season at Sadler's Wells, the company's debut on a major international stage, and received a warm response from a pretty-much-full house. The change in fortunes has been slow and steady; for the last few years, Cedar Lake has developed a reputation as the purveyor of new and interesting European choreography-a genre that for reasons of both taste and economic constraint, isn't much seen in American company repertories.

It's a clever artistic decision on the part of the company's director, Benoit-Swan Pouffer, who joined Cedar Lake as its resident choreographer in 2005 and was promoted to artistic director the following year. Mr. Pouffer is French, although most of his dancing career was spent with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Company in New York. But he remained connected to the European scene, and given a chance to work with a secure budget that would allow him to take risks, he seized it, commissioning pieces from choreographers like Ohad Naharin, Jacopo Godani, Alexander Ekman, Didy Veldman, Hofesh Shechter, Sidi Larbi CHerkaoui, and other rising stars of the European dance scene whose work rarely makes it to New York.

For the company's London debut, Mr. Pouffer chose pieces by Mr. Shechter (“Violet Kid”), Mr. Ekman (“Tuplet”) and Ms. Pite (“Grace Engine”), all of whom are to some extent familiar to British audiences. It's a very good program, offering a taste of Mr. Shechter's intense physicality, Mr. Ekman's quirky vocabulary and Ms. Pite's poetic, lyrical qualities.

“Violet Kid” is a large-scale, full-company affair, similar in some ways to other works by Mr. Shechter in which the group, with its tribal unison, its military formations and its almost facist uniformity, is pitted again the vulnerable individual. Again and again in Mr. Shechter's work are images of a lone figure or two breaking away from or out of a semi-hypnotized group, but the choreographer's skill in weaving these moments seamlessly together keeps the emotional trajectory unpredictable and occasionally harrowing. Mr. Shechter is a composer too, and the music-in part a string trio set high up at the back of the stage, in part a driving electronic score-plays an integral part in the intense world of movement and sound conjured onstage.

Mr. Ekman's “Tuplet” is a fairly lightweight affair, but it shows his talent for dry humor as its six dancers move through undulating, snaking, collapsing movements with jerky precision, to a score that is partly made up of their voices and the percussive effects of their bodies. It's fun-and there is a remarkable male solo from Jonathan Bond at the outset-but it feels disposable against Mr. Hofesh and Ms. Pite's more substantial work.

Ms. Pite was a member of William Forsythe's Frankfurt Ballett for several years, and Mr. Forsythe's complex, coordinated style is evident in her vocabulary, which uses ballet alongside a broader range of movement. In “Grace Engine,” set to a melancholy score by Owen Belton, overlaid by train sounds and haunting footsteps, she creates a series of scenes that suggest a multiplicity of narratives, or perhaps memories. There are groups and tableaus that suddenly reveal solos and duets; strange moments of recognition and departure; a suggestion of death and loss at the end. It's a haunting, atmostpheric piece that has overtones of a ghost story, perhaps even a thriller, and it shows the Cedar Lake dancers brilliantly capturing the dissolving, twisting movement that inflects her choreography.