Mary Brennan

Next week sees Scottish Dance Theatre (SDT) heading out on a spring tour that will take the company all across the UK, to a three-day residency at London's Southbank Centre and to the Equilibrio Festival 2015 in Rome. Fleur Darkin, SDT's artistic director since 2012, understandably flies a proud flag for what her dancers achieve on-stage but she's just as passionate about what goes on, in the studio, when the repertoire is being created. Ask her about the choices she's made in terms of guest choreographers, and almost before she turns to issues of movement vocabulary, concept or stage-ability - or, come to that, audience appeal - Darkin will talk about the quality and legacy of the devising and rehearsal experience for the dancers.

Challenges in the studio are more than fine. "Bring it on!" seems to be her watchword, whatever the situation - she's in the middle of moving house, liaising with the London end of the current tour, as well as tying up pre-tour loose ends at SDT's Dundee base, when we have our early morning confab. She is, nonetheless, in buoyantly high spirits. Genuinely thrilled at what's on course for next week's premieres at Dundee Rep, not least because the risks implicit in her programming choices have already taken the dancers on journeys of self-discovery. "It's been hard for them. Really hard. The work we're doing demands not just every inch of their physicality and stamina. It needs them to invest all their concentration, their hearts and minds. But they've been working with choreographers who make the studio an interesting place to be. And that is hugely important to me. We have Anton Lachky making a completely new work for us, called Dreamers. When I went to meet him, I noticed what the atmosphere was like in his own studio - there was an open-ness, a shared engagement, that I felt would bring out something positive, something new and adventurous in our dancers. And, with Dreamers, I think it has."

Before he set up his own company in 2012, Lachky had toured extensively as a dancer with the Akram Khan Company and as a co-founder of Les SlovaKs Dance Collective. He'd taught workshops all across the globe and when he moved into choreography, his commissions took him to the Venice Biennale and Gottenborg Ballet, among others. Out of this far-ranging CV, Lachky distilled a personal house style that makes room for dancers to improvise, fire up their own imagination and find their own personalities - these can be themselves, exaggerated, or some kind of cartoon "other". He remains in overall control, however. His is the overview, and quirkily inventive vision, that sets bravura high-speed movement against classical music, finding the humour in a spin of hip-hop to a Bach partita, or simply celebrating the sheer strength and liquid grace of a dancer by using Chopin, or Verdi or Haydn as a bridge between art forms, time-scapes, rhythms and moods.

In Dreamers, he's in pursuit of the subconscious impulses that can make us slip into wishful fantasies and mind-games even when we're awake. What emerges can seem like a cartoon-caricature of reality where everyday logic goes into freefall, and somehow the most nonsensical scenarios seem to make perfect sense. Darkin has coupled Dreamers with an existing repertoire work, Jo Stromgren's Winter, Again in which the snow becomes a tainted slush as dark secrets surface to the strains of Schubert's Winterreise.

Damien Jalet's YAMA was originally part of a February 2014 double bill of new work, now it's been extended and has been programmed as a stand-alone piece. "Even in its shorter form, it was a really significant piece of work," says Darkin. "I always felt he was doing something quite fundamental with dance, because YAMA was about metamorphosis - and dance can do metamorphoses really, really well. The ideas he brought in had so much depth, I just thought "go for it!" - let's commission him to expand it and that really was the right decision. It's around an hour-long now, and I think that allows everybody - audiences and dancers - to manage the intensity of it."

There's a distinctly amused chuckle here. Intensity has been the beginning, middle and ongoing thrust of YAMA revisited. "It never was an easy piece to perform," continues Darkin, "we all knew that, Damien especially. It makes demands on the dancers all the way through, whether they're counting beats or interacting with the structure that's always centre-stage. There's no way you can lose focus, and you can't skip and hop through it. It is a very exposing choreography - but that has its own buzz. I think it adds to the emotional intensity of the choreography for them. And for the audience. I still find it hard to watch without getting a bit emotional - it's such an achievement for those dancers. They are taking us somewhere profound, because dance can do that."

She could just as easily be talking about Miann, her own response to the mystical feel of Scotland's standing stones, where the landscape harbours a sense of the past looking over the shoulder of the present. "I'm happy for audiences to be entertained, of course," she says. "But I'd love them to have even more. For them to be able to share with us in something that has real depth to it, emotionally and artistically."

Bring it on!

*YAMA is at Dundee Rep on Thursday February 12 and Traverse, Edinburgh on Wednesday February 18; Winter, Again and Dreamers are at Dundee Rep on Friday and Saturday February 13 &14 and at the Traverse on Thursday February 19