Festival Dance

Tao Dance Theatre

Royal Lyceum Theatre

Mary Brennan

FOUR STARS

Two white-clad figures in flowing robes – the over-long sleeves and floating layers reminiscent of traditional Chinese costumes – step, hand-in-hand, into the modern-minimalist rhythmic realm of Steve Reich’s Drumming Part 4. It’s a marriage of patterns in time and space, unfolding like a meticulously formalised ritual and it’s the opening duet in Tao Ye’s Weight x 3. As the looping phrases and repetitions in movement continue – with each step or nod of the head, each spin or high kick delivered with a honed synchronicity – the clockwork stamina of the dancers edges beyond an act of memory and physical prowess. Like the subsequent solo, where a lone figure endlessly twirls a rapid stick without faltering, or the final duet with its criss-crossing paths, this first duet draws you into a focussed awareness of how simple forms can accumulate into complex structures. You could say it’s choreography that meditates on the cosmos – it’s also choreography that burrows into your imagination.

The second work, 5, sees a quintet of interlinking bodies lure your imagination into running riot. Initially, as limbs without obvious owners slither and stretch, the hybrid mass suggests the primal soup of evolution. When those limbs tendril into the air – antennae? saplings? – it hints at molecular organisms shape-shifting into species. Torsos rise up, but still the force-field of connection holds firm, and individuality is subsumed into the general being. Even when the music turns strident with insistent discords, the cohesive calm remains unbroken: hands support other heads, bodies arc over other backs, support and co-existence proving the essence of Tao Ye’s life-affirming choreographic and philosophical vision. Perhaps, inevitably, not to everyone’s taste but rapturously received by an almost full house.