Verdict: Four stars
O Yes, Glasgow School of Art
O Yes was time travel in motion. Harking us back, to the Edinburgh International Festival of 1988, where the Michael Clark Company are ripping up the stage to the vehement, rampant (live) sound of The Fall in I Am Curious, Orange.
Commissioned for the Holland Festival, the title is a roguish reference to the tercentenary of William and Mary's accession to the English throne in 1689. For Clark, with his roots in Scotland, William of Orange is an evergreen symbol of sectarian tensions both on and off the football pitch - he acknowledges, and spoofs this, in a sequence called Yes Oh Yes.
On Friday night, that segment was recreated as part of The Inventors of Tradition II, a project by Atelier E.B and Panel that links into the forthcoming Dance International Glasgow. Now no-one, least of all the remarkable Ellen van Schuylenburch - who danced in the original production and re-staged this fragment - would pretend that there was time for her young dancers to master Clark's vocabulary of sharp, precise angularities or boldly skewed classicism.
But what did burst forth, thanks to students from London's Trinity Laban and Dance Studio Scotland - variously sporting Celtic and Rangers strips as in the 1988 production- was the larky humour, the nippy footwork, the ducking and weaving feel of match-play.
On a raised stage, an ad hoc band rallied together by Tut Vu Vu paid visceral, pounding homage to Mark E Smith and The Fall. On the dance floor, bodies twisted in flight, legs flashed high, like sudden switch-blades though never - unlike real life - in violent affray. Six glorious minutes that proved age cannot wither Clark's choreographic invention - o yes, indeed.
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