Motion Of Displacement/Elsa Canasta

Seen at Theatre Royal, Glasgow

Reviewed by Alan Morrison

Let’s think of Scottish Ballet’s Autumn Season programme as a tour with twin headliners and a local support act. And, as can often be the case on the music circuit when that support act is poised on the brink of bigger things, it’s this first item on the bill that almost steals the show.

Paris-born Sophie Laplane joined Scottish Ballet in 2004 and has risen to coryphée within the company. Earlier this year, she choreographed and danced a beautiful seaside-sunset music video for SAY Award-winner Kathryn Joseph’s haunting song, The Bird. Now Scottish Ballet Artistic Director Christopher Hampson has given her a blank space to create Maze, the piece – unannounced in the printed programme – that opens this autumn bill.

At first two male dancers, one blindfolded, cross the stage to minimal piano and cello soundtrack, the curve of their raised arms and pointed fingers suggesting, perhaps, a minotaur’s horns. As the music shifts to an ambient jazz mood, they’re replaced by two female dancers who seem to include tiny echoes of a street-dance style in the body-pops of their movements.

Finally all four dancers strut and preen in some sort of mating ritual, heads pecking, arms all angular strength and lightning-fast motion. The double duets of this final section are very impressive, and Laplane is clearly a major talent in the making.

Indeed, from a personal point of view, I found more originality in the muscular shapes of Maze than in some of the more traditional ballet set-pieces of Motion Of Displacement, a world premiere by Bryan Arias. That’s not to say that Arias doesn’t bring a more subtle and poignant element to his choreography, which is inspired by his mother’s tales of leaving her native land for love.

The Puerto Rica-born, New York-based choreographer renders memory, longing and self-sacrifice in physical form, and it’s an affecting piece of work because of this. Right from the start, as lightbulbs rise like fireflies to form a starry constellation above a tableau of ten dancers, Arias communicates with the audience on a deeper emotional level. What matters here are details: the briefest of touches, the turning away of a head, the fleeing feet of principal Sophie Martin as she’s raised above the stage, running but remaining in place.

The other headline feature in this autumn programme is the Scottish premiere of Elsa Canasta, cheekily and sometimes lustily choreographed by Javier de Frutos to music by Cole Porter (and sung live by Nick Holder accompanied by an in-the-jazz-groove Scottish Ballet Orchestra). Couples – gay and straight – flirt, fondle and fight on and below a stairway that wouldn’t be out of place in a classic Hollywood musical. Indeed, that staircase itself becomes a staggered plane from which the dancers take thrilling leaps into their partners’ arms.

Overall, however, Elsa Canasta is more like a dream sequence from a Gene Kelly movie than the regimented high-kicks of a Busby Berkeley extravaganza. Duets, solos and ensemble routines follow one another with gleeful abandon and yet, for all its liveliness, there’s always a lingering sense of after-hours melancholy embedded in the music and the movement.

Scottish Ballet’s autumn season is at His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen on Friday and Saturday