26
DANCE/THEATRE
LONDON'S SEASON BEST. Cont'd.
Scottish
Dance Theatre. Rating:
At
The Dundee Rep
By
Alice Bain
Scottish
Dance Theatre has become a cornerstone of Scotland's tight-knit dance community.
The dancers work hard and it shows. The force of director Janet Smith has been
with them for the past six years. As the autumn tour begins and new custom-built
studios are about to be opened at home-base Dundee Rep, this troupe has a
winning, healthy glow.
The
new programme patches old with new, international with homegrown. My House is
Melting was a winner in the Peter Darrell Choreographic awards shown in Glasgow
earlier this year. Created by Beth Cassani, it casts a wide choreographic net -
telling life stories, playing games, mixing dance with acrobatic tumbles at an
ever-changing pace. It starts in a cold place with a gang of traveling players,
all leather jackets and boots with eastern European touches. A large ball of ice
on a rope tick-tocks with the soundtrack. Partnerships come and go as ephemeral
props - feathers, bubbles and party poppers - festoon the stage. It's a
concoction that blends serious with light-hearted, likable enough but locked in
a strange place somewhere between pastiche, slapstick and serious dance theatre.
On the Edge, by French choreographer Annabelle Bonnéry, is a mostly sweet take
on a foursome going out on the town. The couples are satisfyingly different. The
two on the giant pillow are all at once coy and all over each other. The other
two are fighters, wrangling over nail varnishing time and ending up on the
floor. Wheeling round nippy choreography with humour and confidence, the dancers
make short work of this poignant 20 minutes. Broken is a succinct, deceptively
demanding piece by Portuguese choreographer Rui Horta. Flanked by two columns of
scratchy black-and-white film, a man and woman are funneled into the grey space
between. The relationship crosses paths in flips and tumbles, rolls on backs. In
a climactic moment, the two streams of film symbolically snap into one. Man
carries woman off on his back. Though the steps are all there, this dance moves
in emotional territory slightly out of reach of the first-night pair.
