Dance International Glasgow

Scottish Ballet:Each Other

Liz Aggiss: Slap & Tickle

Siobhan Davies Dance:material/rearranged/to/be

Tramway, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

Five stars

A welter of shoes engulfs the Tramway stage. None of them are pointe-shoes. Choreographers Uri Ivgi and Johan Greben have yanked Scottish Ballet’s dancers out of their classically-trained comfort zone and into the seismic landscape of Each Other. Dancers in raggedy tops and skin tight britches are human flotsam and jetsom. Initially scavenging among the shoes, garnering them up like trove, then structuring them into a wall - whereupon they become two opposing tribes, limbs gesticulating in jaggy, frenetic spasms as Tom Parkinson’s soundscape pelts between chaos and order. The politics of how societies form and dissolve are implicit here, but there is also a sad, intense undertow of how individuals cope in the face of being an “unmatched shoe”. Ensembles send the dancers hurtling from agitation into brisk, military formations, solos are complex and pliant with yearnings for a significant “other” and a need to belong. Brutal, visionary, seething with timeless relevance, Each Other saw the young dancers triumph in a profoundly challenging choreography that needs to be seen again after this world premiere.
How to follow such a bravura jolt to the perceptions? Liz Aggiss is yer woman for full-frontal assaults on blinkered, biased attitudes. Slap &Tickle is her glorious broadside against the social mores that pigeon-hole women of all ages. What a prance-y, wicked lark it is: a mix of German Expressionist dance styles, English music hall rudery, children’s games of yesteryear and a mischievous willingness to use her own (sixty-something, totally fit for purpose) body as a vehicle for graphic exposes of sexism. The hilarious tickle never undermines the serious slap in this solo - sheer brilliance.
Walk into Tramway 2, slowly absorb the rich possibilities that range across the space - video images spooling across a screen here, a dance artist performing in another corner, a vast lattice of copper piping hanging from the ceiling - and then surrender to the superb adventure into time, space and movement that Siobhan Davies and her collaborators have fashioned in material/rearranged/to/be. There are poetic, thought-provoking texts framed by that pipework that will encourage awareness of your own physicality. Davies and Helka Kaski, in a cocoon of concentration, will be exploring a wordless dialogue of nuanced movement, Charlie Morrissey will be making fleeting thoughts into visible actions. Other creative talents will join in, the space will be like a kaleidoscope of moving images. Go, enjoy - it’s free.