Dance
ProjectY 2018
Tramway, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
three stars
YDance (formerly Scottish Youth Dance) is now older than the performers on-stage in this touring showcase. Their ages range from 16 to 21. The organisation itself turns 30 this year and while its overview of dance provision in Scotland – and its far-reaching contribution to it – is very ‘grown up’, the emphasis is still firmly on giving young people the chance to dance.
The 21 participants in ProjectY’s recent three week summer school also had a chance to work with high end professional choreographers – Sophie Laplane (who has made work for Scottish Ballet) among them. Laplane’s Persist! saw ten girls, in suffragette-green cotton frocks, breaking out of emblematic restrictions – silencing hands across their own mouths, a tendency to ‘disappear’ in a crowd – and become individuals possessed of a hungry, re-defining, energy. Laplane’s well-focussed assertiveness was underpinned by a feisty soundscore that decreed these women were entitled to cut loose and rock!
There was a similar feel, of needing to be true to yourself,in James Cousins’s An Old Story So New It’s Happening which peeled away disparate layers of music and movement to explore images of repressed identity. The entire company sloughed off matching dungarees, releasing limbs and inner turmoils with a challenging intensity that saw two loners/outsiders finally holding onto a togetherness they wouldn’t disguise with those dungarees. Circulate in Red (choreographed by Richard Chappell) rippled with undercurrents of inter-dependency, where a duo’s brief physical contact – a lift, a counterbalance – visibly reverberated through the whole group like a chemical reaction, or a tribal impulse. Finally, in Metamorphosis (by Anna Kenrick). A true renegade outsider – Salvador Dali – came centre-stage, emerging from the baggy-trousered full ensemble in a flurry of quirky escapades that then, as happened in real life, encouraged others to break ranks in the name of art. Great fun, and delivered with mischievous élan.
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