Arches Live '12, Arches, Glasgow

Dance critic

Thursday 20 September 2012

Experience really comes to the fore in this first tranche of new works in the current Arches Live season.

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Mary Brennan

And though Laura Bradley tags 29/92 (Phyllis) (HHHH) as a work-in-progress, this show already has a remarkable and affecting power, and a thoughtfulness that – both in Bradley's movement and in her stillnesses – allows the material to breathe and communicate.

The Phyllis of the title is Bradley's grandmother, the 92 to her 29 years. We hear her voice, chuckling and almost girlish, on a conversational tape where Bradley gently leads her into remembering her childhood, marriage, child-bearing and "the change" (which she now gleefully recalls in terms of "ranting and raving"). As the memories unfold, Bradley tries, through movements, to inhabit a life so different from her own modern one. And yet, both women are connected. Maybe a love of small joys, an ability to see beauty in the commonplace – and a fabulous laugh – are in their gene pool. Inexperience is perhaps what stymies From Above Here (HH). When Stephanie Black and Aby Watson are mapping out their friendship on the floor – their different personalities reflected in the wool one uses, the bird seed favoured by the other – the patternings echo the overlapping of their paths, hint at the shifting dynamics of the relationship and point to separate futures. However, their recorded chatter – rambling, sometimes mumbled and indistinct – is too much: it needs editing, better pacing and most of all it needs the kind of silences that would let the emerging installation and their moments of contact speak for themselves.Roses Are Dead (HH) has the makings of a cleverly sweet and sour love story, but – like the affair it dissects – it's over before it's had a chance to hit its stride. She (Lucy Hollis) bitchily mocks his love-songs; he (Andrew McGregor) retaliates with loaded lyrics – all very slickly rehearsed. Have they really split up? Further along the Arches' basement corridor, Calum MacAskill, in a massive burdensome horned head, is the captive monster in Minotaur/Monitor (HH). Body bent in pain, forever watched on CCTV, he is a pitiful shadow of the mythic threat that growls from a tape recorder. Again, this is a work that could gain from being extended – perhaps into a durational installation where onlookers could spend longer appreciating what MacAskill is tapping into.All runs ended. Arches Live '12 continues until September 29.

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Beauty

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Arches Live '12, Arches, Glasgow

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