Review: Dance

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

Mary Brennan

UNTIL a dancer sets foot on it, an empty stage can be anywhere in time and space. It's this mystery - and all the attendant possibilities - that Shobana Jeyasingh taps into with her first ever choreography for Rambert: Terra Incognita. Five couples, all in unfussy vests and short skirts, initiate Jeyasingh's themes of exploration with prowling wary-alert steps that soon take on the positive stamp of knowing, and owning, the terrain. As this map-making evolves, so the space itself takes on different perspectives - sometimes through directional lighting, sometimes through drop-down gauzes of separation, but always in an echo of mankind's engagement with the unknown, until finally the last (upstage) "frontier" holds the image of a swirling galaxy. In a way, Jeyasingh's movement vocabulary is also mapping her own journey as a choreographer, with accents of her Indian classical dance background informing the Western contemporary styles. Rambert's dancers plunge into these unknown hybrid forms with an unforced precision that keeps the crossover mapped out with crisp finesse.

The Castaways, choreographed by Barak Marshall to a soundscape of travelling rhythms - Balkan folk music, Yiddish pop and 50's Americana among them - echoes Sartre's view that "hell is other people", as tensions erupt among the strangers cooped up in a sealed room. Their warring squabblings, hopes and doomed romances are the outside world in miniature, their hugger-mugger isolation a cleverly merry dance of gung-ho swaggering and human frailties. Christopher Bruce's Rooster sends us out on a high of Rolling Stones music and sassy moves.