Three Stars So, what kind of critter are these little Varmints? Ear flaps on their headgear hint at bunny kin, as does the carefree way they bounce among the grassy strips on-stage.
Four dancers merrily conjure up a wild garden idyll, unsuspecting that this habitat is under threat: heavy wheels are soon (and quite literally) eating up the green turf even as the modest cityscape on the back-cloth morphs into a grim industrialised metropolis - the projections throughout have a brilliant, graphic-cartoon feel to them. So too, do the scary robotic drones who displace the happy varmints until only one is left - choreographer/performer Wilkie Branson - who spirits away the last remaining bit of plant-life.
Based on Helen Ward and Mark Craste's book, Varmints, this dance piece for young children (aged 7+) is not exactly raging against the machine, just warning against doing nothing to protect nature. It culminates in the little shoot that Branson saved and nurtured taking root - exquisite traceries of light on the back-cloth show branches reaching across the urban sprawl - and the Varmints restored to their frolics. If this story is simple, Branson's mix of dance styles has a rich, expressive diversity that edges from the playful to the (break-dance inflected) dramatic, with uniformed menace and swervingly athletic prowess shaded in. Composer Benji Bower underpins these shifts of mood and style with an evocatively filmic score, so that young ears as well as eyes are attuned to one brave, determined Varmint's ecological challenge. It's danced with real conviction, staged with a fine attention to detail - the downside? Greenock was the only date in DIG (Dance International Glasgow).
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