Dance GB, Theatre Royal, Glasgow

Dance critic

Wednesday 20 June 2012

Three national companies present three very different new works as the UK's dance-makers carry a torch for the spirit of the London 2012 Olympics.

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mary brennan

Our own home team, Scottish Ballet, open this triple bill on a high with Run For It, a brilliantly dynamic abstraction of athletic endeavour, stamina and prowess imaginatively choreographed by Martin Lawrance to a seethingly rhymthic score by John Adams and strikingly staged under a canopy of metallic fins designed by Turner Prize-winner Martin Boyce.

At first, the canopy (with its off-centre Doric column) suggests a tree, but when a red glow plays over the 'foliage', this sculptural installation is like a flaring Olympic torch. Lawrance's richly-textured movement answers those images with a stirring mix of sharply-etched angularities and curving sinuosity – both sit well with the geometric cut of Boyce's work. And yes, there are echoes of ancient and modern track and field in the way the dancers' limbs cut and thrust, or bodies leap, whirl or soar upwards in high lifts. But Lawrance has an elegant touch and the dancers simply revel in the challenging details of his duets and ensembles.Christopher Bruce's Dream, for National Dance Company Wales, makes the most obvious use of sporting motifs, but tweaks them deliciously into a witty, tender evocation of a 50s rural community where happy-go-lucky races morph into tit-bits of Olympic events to the tune of Ravel's Bolero. The clever humour, however, is a tribute to how ordinary folk – now, as then – embrace the romance and aspiration of the Games... even when hopping in a sack!Itzik Galiili's And the Earth Shall Bear Again sends English National Ballet into dramatic realms of light and shadow, the dancers eddying in and out of formations to works for prepared piano by John Cage. A larger stage would serve his patternings better, but the sense of ritual and of cyclical energies – heightened by a painterly use of colour washes and focused beams – catches at how Olympics come and go, and are here again... HHHH

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Dance GB, Theatre Royal, Glasgow

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