Dance

Watch This Space

FOUR STARS

Somewhere Between 3 and 4

THREE STARS

Cottier’s Theatre, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

IF THE Cottier Dance Project offers a much-needed platform for choreographers – different ages, at different stages, but all keen to try out new ideas – it also offers audiences a glimpse of what’s cooking behind (usually closed) studio doors. Watch This Space gave four dance-makers the floor for about ten minutes each: just enough time to suggest the thrust and style of what a longer piece might look like – and to leave you wanting more. This was especially true of Rosina Bonsu’s Stateless which, as the name implies, focussed on the power-plays between those who “belong” and outsiders who are rebuffed. Using nine dancers, and a graphic strategy of taping the floor into zones, Bonsu gave visceral force to images of exclusion, as when Brian Hartley repeatedly flung himself into a close-packed community only to be forcefully catapulted out.

Joanne Pirrie brought a restless energy, and a formidable strength and poise, to Enclosure, a solo choreographed by Glen McArtney that saw her negotiating barriers – not just the metal ones on-stage, but the inhibiting forces within her. Unseen forces were also at work as dancer/choreographer Jack Webb seemed to float into an astral plane in Drawn to Drone, his limbs – moving as if gracefully weightless – released by sleep into sensory searches of their own. Lewis Normand’s Passing Flight, danced by Lucy Ireland and Katie Miller, had an intriguing shift between present realities and the hereafter where echoes of earthly interactions, tensions and joyful collusions retain the spirit of a relationship.

If the musical choices throughout Watch This Space lent colour to performances without set or costuming then Somewhere Between 3 and 4 celebrated the kind of quirky, stimulating discourse that evolves when three jazz musicians – Allon Beauvoisin (saxophone), John Allan (bass) and Stuart Brown (percussion) – enter into exchanges with a dancer, Chrissie Ardill. Who was influencing whom? Let’s say it was a playful debate full of criss-crossing rhythms and teasing flights of individual musicality where the urge to groove and to move in the moment produced flashes of unexpected harmony across genres.