Scottish Ballet, Tramway Glasgow
FOUR STARS
27, Arches Glasgow
FOUR STARS
Jonathan Burrows/Matteo Fargion, Tramway Glasgow FOUR STARS
Mary Brennan
If the new-minted Dance International Glasgow (DIG) has a vision of dance for all, then the season's opening weekend was a spirited and inspiring beginning. Scottish Ballet joined forces with integrated company Indepen-dance 4 in Exalt, a new choreography by Marc Brew that celebrated individuality even as it brought all the dancers - including a wheelchair user and adults with learning difficulties - into a final, thrillingly synchronised ensemble. On a bare stage, flanked by four rafter-high ladders, twenty or so dancers in brief body-suits - some black, some blue - explored the joys and challenges of movement to the rippling, looping rhythms of Nils Frahm. There were phrases of precise articulation, where limbs revelled in details of flexibility, trios and duets where counterbalances tested the different strengths of stand-alone endeavour and supported aspirations. As the various aspects of Brew's clever choreographic invention jig-sawed together, its bigger picture was of a dance truly shared. If the slender-swaying ladders stayed un-scaled, the thought was clear: look up, think - and go - as high as you can.
That mantra could apply to Luciana Ravizzi's 14 years with Scottish Ballet. She ended on a personal high, partnered by Victor Zarallo and leading Hans van Manen's 5 Tangos with just the right blend of smouldering hauteur and sharp attack. A quick mention, too for the opening short film, Portrait of Marc Brew. Choreographed by Jamiel Laurence, filmed by Lewis Landini, it was a warm, witty close up of Brew by himself in the studio.
Strictly speaking, 27 isn't dance. It's performance, and more a part of Arches Behaviour than DIG - but it does have a visceral physicality that goes beyond words, and actively connects both festivals. Director/deviser Peter McMaster is now 27, as is his mate and fellow performer Nick Anderson. Their initial costuming - clingy skeleton unitards - suggest mortality is on their mind but before long, they've bared their bodies and, increasingly, their souls. To a soundscore that pops with music by artists - Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix among them - who died aged 27, the duo plunge into rituals of self-castigation and guilt-laden apologies that are all the more harrowing to watch because they are often not just funny but ridiculous in their extremes.
Naked throughout, they wrestle their demons, and each other, on a floor strewn with powdery ash. They sweat, it clings. The flesh we'd all been invited to pinch or hug, turns corpse-like as the ash compounds the grit of frank, even graphic, personal disclosures about family, sex, relationships, maleness and the stuff of innermost unease. Part death-wish (to the old self), part exorcism (it's the past that needs to be buried), 27 sometimes feels like it will disintegrate under the intensity of its own naked honesty and self-scrutiny - and not every random voice from the audience can stand and clearly deliver necessary text. Yet that very vulnerability goes to the heart of their matter, right to the end when - exhausted but resolute - our lads choose life.
Two men, Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion, two chairs, and a drolly adroit hand-jive escapade called Both Sitting Duet. Like the subsequent Body Not Fit For Purpose - in which Fargion plays mandolin and Burrows semaphores in a kind of gestural expressionistic way to titles like Bank Bailout No 3 or Vladimir Putin - what seems a simple progression of hand flicks, little waves, finger exercises and arm stretches builds into a highly sophisticated orchestration of minimal movements that tease our perceptions, making us laugh and think and - hands instinctively together - applaud as we DIG it.
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