DANCE

GEIST

Tramway, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

THREE STARS

Five dancers, spaced out across the Tramway stage, each one totally still, as if frozen. Three tall screens, spaced out across the Tramway stage, each one filled with images of those freeze-framed dancers - designer Philine Rinnert apparently had stained glass windows in mind when she created them. Their hint of religious iconography is acknowledged in elements of Colette Sadler's latest work Geist, given its first-ever showing at Dance International Glasgow (DIG). For as her dancers begin to twitch, as if their flesh was galvanised by an invisible current, the whole notion of what animates us - even resurrects us out of stasis - also comes alive albeit in a forensic, rather than a spiritual way.

Sadler's movement vocabulary has a taste for the details of articulation: the flexing of a hand, an arm, and how that travels into, say, a shoulder shrug can - like the way a sudden lunge forward alters body-line and balance - prompt whole phrases of pure dance. Here those outbursts of activity provide sharp visual contrasts with the sculptural forms that take hold when action subsides into immobility. The intriguing tease here, is how we look and respond to these opposite states. Even more intriguing is how those same five bodies seem to discard active humanity when - still without eye contact or any sign of relationship connections - the dancers interlink like a 3D human jigsaw to form what could be a molecular structure or a hybrid creature. It holds, then shapes, and re-shapes in a slither while a soundscore of spitting, buzzing pulses crackles like electricity. Is this what animated matter, and mankind? Whether gripped by stillness, jittering into vitality or cutting loose with full-on energies, Sadler's dancers make chewy concepts watchable.