“Faster, the triple bill’s main event, is a new piece by David Bintley – an Olympic-year tribute to the sporting spirit – with a driving, pumping, excitable new score by Matthew Hindson. The work looks fantastic, with the 21 dancers dressed in sports kit to which designer Becs Andrews has added a sharp, knowing twist of glamour.
In the first section, various Olympic sports are represented in a series of short dances that blend the literal and the abstract to a carefully judged degree. The atmosphere changes for a stern, tactile duet between Elisha Willis and Iain Mackay, which conveys both tenderness and the impersonality of the competitive ethos, and the piece ends with the company running en masse to the point of exhaustion. It is a dynamic new work, and its effect, interestingly, is to bring home the brutal physicality of dance, as much as sport.” Laura Thompson