Dance

BalletBoyz: Life

King’s Theatre, Edinburgh

Mary Brennan

four stars

IN THE midst of Life, we are in death. The BalletBoyz are hanging about the (on-stage) studio when Jim Carter’s robust tones announce the demise of their guest choreographer Javier de Frutos. This is all Fiction. De Frutos, happily, is still with us – his flair for mischief and dynamic, often perilous movement, alive and kicking to Ben Foskett’s cunning mix of musical moods. While Carter, then Imelda Staunton and finally Derek Jacobi, navigate the techniques of reading aloud a slightly tongue-in-cheek obituary, the lads are demonstrating ferocious physical techniques – ranging from balletic to athletic – that centre on and around that staple of everyday class: the barre.

At times, there are witty chorus-line nods to de Frutos’s penchant for cabaret and camp, but the urgency that sends the seriously buff bodies hurtling over and under the barre embraces anger, grief, melancholy and a need to flock together. The frequent outsider in this – emblematic of de Frutos’s own renegade talent – is Marc Galvez, who imperceptibly slips into director-mode, bringing order to mournful disarray. His solo spinning to Donna Summer’s disco anthem, last Dance, ends Fiction with boogie-on style – typical de Frutos joie-de-vivre.

Before the interval, Pontus Lidberg’s Rabbit had also played with the light and shade of life, with the shifts from elegaic to jangling-jazzy in Gorecki’s Little Requiem for a Certain Polka vividly akin to a parade of one man’s memories. The surreal edge arrives with the floppy-eared rabbit heads that transform dancers into capricious bunnies: shades of Wonderland childhood scamperings, or perhaps an eerier memento of how adult problems can crowd in and multiply like, erm, rabbits. The BalletBoyz hop to it with impressive elan.

BalletBoyz: Life is at Dundee Rep on Monday May 23 and Tuesday May 24