The It company from New York City boasts 14 of the best dancers that the money of its founder and funder Wal-Mart heiress, Nancy Laurie, can buy and what those 14 fabulously honed and interestingly diverse beings can do is certainly superb. It is a party of instantly recognisable personalities – gorgeously Amazonian Ebony Williams, dynamic Matthew Rich with a long swishing ponytail, wistful-faced Vania Doutel Vaz – all bound by a shared, passion-fuelled talent.

The choreographic line-up is also sterling.

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Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet’s 16 terrific dancers are sleek and precise, fluent and fluid, technically proficient. Like dancers in most touring companies these days, they can do anything asked of them, and more.  Though they are an international bunch, American dance training is pretty much a common denominator.

The company were formed in 2003, and this Auckland Festival season marks their New Zealand debut, close on the heels of a season at the Adelaide Festival. It brings a triple bill of works commissioned from leading choreographers, Canadian Crystal Pite, who is artistic director of Kid Pivot and a former member of William Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt; UK-based Israeli choreographer, composer and artistic director Hofesh Shechter, a former member of Ohad Naharin’s Batsheva Dance Company; and Norwegian choreographer and artistic director Jo Stomgren, who leads his own theatre company which specialises in performing in nonsensical languages.

Pite and Schechter share common themes in their works in this triple bill programme. They are darkly lit and set to threatening, percussive scores, and the events seem to be happening in some very near future time when human existence is under threat.

Pite’s Grace Engine has a sound score by Owen Belton which combines sampled sounds and granular synthesis, street noise and chaotic industrial sounds.  It includes the recurrent clatter of a train and snatches of echoing footsteps, b which combine with the dark suits worm by the dancers to suggest they are corporate employees. Cleverly varied lighting by Jim French provides a horror movie/nightmare atmosphere, rotating through sections which make use of overhead fluorescent strips, a row of spotlights which shine straight at the audience at dancer hip-level, isolated single lights and clumps of downlights which reveal a cluster of people off to the side, or silhouette a battalion of fleeing figures, interspersed with more brightly-lit freeze-frame moments of great clarity.

There’s an overwhelming sense of paranoia in the early sections, with individuals under tension twitching and whirling to face invisible foes, fighting with demons only they can see, engaging in dramatic face-offs, freezing into tensely tortuous poses. Once the full company engages, there is relatively constant movement punctuated by freeze framed action, detailed solos, extreme extensions which blur into martial fight moves, rows of faces shrieking silent screams, recurring battles between the genders, and an occasional breakout duet which seems sublimely serene.

The dancers wear colourful street clothes in Schechter’s Violet Kid, but despite the individuality this offers, once they start moving, they become a relatively faceless mass of bodies. Shechter puts his focus on “man’s struggle for harmony within a complex and sometimes horrifying universe,” a theme which he has explored a number of times now, notably for his own company in works such as Political Mother, which we saw here in New Zealand in 2012. 

Schechter’s score intermixes a string trio with recorded spoken words and percussive, driving industrial noise. His lighting design (co-credited to Jim French) is darkly apocalyptic, with swirling haze and shadowy corners, and occasional bursts of piercing light. By contrast to the relatively open, upright, extreme extensions seen in the world of Grace Engine, in Schecter’s world the dancers are down-trodden, demoralised, under the yoke of the oppressor, with the dancers bent over, crouching, huddling in groups, moving in clumps, shuffling, creeping, slithering across the floor, making occasional breaks for individual freedom before re-attaching to the nearest cluster of humanity, or all coming together into some brief unison moment.

The mood is relatively uniform, and there is little sense of drama despite the potential for violence to break out at any moment. Light and shade comes from broken rhythms, with folkdance steps – step hop, hop step, schottische, triplets – mixed in amongst the steps and shuffles, runs and lunges and falls and rolls that comprise the primary movement. Contrasts are included to offer occasional hope for some kind of freedom – a man spins exultantly, a formal procession wends across the space, whip-speed encounters happen below the radar of the oppressor, and arms sway lyrically as one person’s gesture is taken up by others.

Jo Stromgren’s Necessity, Again brings an abrupt change of mood seems a particularly odd choice for this programme. It’s an absurdist romp, overtly theatrical and farcical in mood, set to cheesy music sung by Charles Aznavour and styled very much like a B-grade musical. The only thing it has in common with the other works is the inclusion of interpolated recorded text – amongst bursts of poetry, all in French, is Jacques Derrida reading an extract of his own Deconstruction & Necessity.

The dancers assume overtly caricatured personas in much the same way as they wear their retro-60s party clothing, just for the purpose of the moment’s entertainment. Bundles of paper are carried, dropped to the floor, liberally spread about the stage, sorted into piles, tossed in the air, and pegged to washing lines which become party decorations at the back of the stage. Conga lines form and schmaltzy social dancing takes place. A woman dances on a table top and is manipulated by three men who move her and the table around the stage; one of the lines of pegged paper sheets becomes a jump rope, and the curtain falls with the cast skipping. 

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